“Pol Pot’s Dance”: Cambodia’s dictator tried to eradicate classical dance, but was saved by his foster mother – Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival

In one of the most poignant films to have its world premiere at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival, archival footage shows a suave-looking man dressed in black sitting down for an interview with a Yugoslav journalist. The year is around 1977.

“Comrade, you are the first to hear my resume,” the man says with a warm laugh.

The man is Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator who was then in the middle of his four-year genocidal reign of terror over his country, a period in which a quarter of Cambodia’s population perished.

Director Enrique Sanchez Lunch tracked down the incredibly rare interview in the archives of Serbian television. Pol Pot almost never spoke to journalists, and rarely told the truth about his background. In the 1977 conversation, he painted a modest picture of his childhood — saying he grew up as the son of a “peasant farmer.” It was a self-serving fantasy with only a semblance of reality.

The true story of Pol Pot’s background – his formative years in Cambodia’s royal court and how his adoptive mother, who was a dancer at that court – appears in Sanchez’s film Lunch Pol Pot dancing.

“He would make his upbringing public and would not reveal his connection in any way to dancing or in any way to the Royal Palace,” Sanchez Lunch tells Deadline. “His version was very humble, and anyone in any county could have had it, that kind of upbringing.”

There is more significance to the film than simply validating the dictator’s mythical narrative. While in power from 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot’s regime brutally suppressed intellectuals and artists – including dancers. His policies nearly wiped out the country’s long tradition of Khmer classical dance, which serves much more than just cultural adornment but is vital to Cambodia’s sense of self.

“If there are two main pillars of Cambodian culture that everyone relates to, they are dance and Angkor (Wat), the ruins of the temples of Angkor,” he says. “Even people who don’t go to shows regularly or never dance, they really cherish this kind of dance and they really look up to it and they really look up to the people who dedicate their time to doing this kind of dance. So, destroying this dance was like destroying part of my identity.” “The country.”

As the film reveals, Chea Samy (1919-1994) is remembered as one of the greatest artists in Cambodia’s ritual dance tradition. Her skill made her a favorite in the court of King Sisowath Monivong, who ruled from 1927 until his death in 1941. After the king’s death, Sammy married a man who had two younger brothers, one of whom was a boy named Saloth Sar. Interestingly, decades later, that same boy became a communist revolutionary and took the name Pol Pot.

Sami was not only Saloth Sar’s sister-in-law, but also his foster mother. Young Sar left his village to live with his older brother and his wife in the royal palace complex.

“(Sammy) especially loved him, so he was practically the son she always wanted to have,” Sanchez Lunch points out. “So, she put all her love into him, but she also made sure that he had all the possibilities that only children from a high bourgeois family could have in terms of education.”

The future Pol Pot attended university in Paris, where he became radicalized. When he took on the mantle of revolutionary leader, he took on different names and protected his identity. Even when he eventually seized power in Cambodia, ordinary people had no idea what their leader looked like. Because of this, Sami had no idea that the boy she helped raise had turned out to be the architect of the genocide. She only discovered her connection to Pol Pot after randomly seeing a picture of him on the wall.

“Some Cambodians (in that era) might have heard him occasionally on the radio, but people were rarely exposed to his face,” Sanchez-Lanche says. “It is quite plausible that after three years of Khmer Rouge rule, not many people knew what it was like.”

The Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot eliminated all those, like the Sami, who embodied and transmitted the country’s dance traditions. The former dancer, like millions of others, was sent to the countryside to work in support of the Khmer Rouge’s agrarian dystopia – her graceful hands, so essential to the expressive forms of Cambodia’s traditional dance – withering and stiffening by the day, by the month. After a month of toil.

Sammy somehow survived and dedicated the rest of her life to teaching a new generation of young people how to perform the precise dances she had mastered as a child. The film featured one of her students, Sopheline Chem Shapiro, choreographing a dance that tells the story of the Sami and their adopted son Saloth Sar/Pol Pot. The rehearsals and scenes from the dance form the crux of the matter Pol Pot dancing – In a sense, by paying homage to this art form, the film can be described as a rebuke to the dictator who almost eliminated a form of artistic expression that belongs to the world’s cultural heritage.

“It was never written down,” Sanchez Lanche explains of the Khmer classical dance. “There has never been such a scripture, how do you do this dance training. It was really given from one teacher to the next. So, if you break this oral tradition by killing all the participants, this tradition will disappear.”

Pol Pot dancing It is shown for the first time in international competition on the 26th^y Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival, competing in this category with 11 world, international and European premieres. Sanchez Lunch made the trip to Thessaloniki from Berlin, where he lives.

“It’s my first time here,” he says. “It’s a great experience… I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it has an excellent reputation and as far as I can see, it’s definitely living up to that reputation… They have great audiences and as I see in the Q&A, they ask really good questions.

From Thessaloniki, Dance pot pot It will be screened at festivals in Warsaw and Munich, the director tells Deadline. The film will premiere in theaters in Germany in the fall. Sanchez Lunch also hopes to take the film to other parts of the world that have become home to the Cambodian diaspora, including Southern California.

“This is where the largest Cambodian community is in the United States. And then there is another large Cambodian community in France,” he says, adding that the film team is working on a strategy to also bring the film to Cambodia, where many of the dancers featured in the film live and practice. Their art.

The director says he hopes “to see the reactions of ordinary Cambodian audiences because to this day, Pol Pot’s association with dance, and his upbringing near the royal palace, is something that not many people know about.”