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Reviews
Neak sre (1994)
Malaysian novel turned into Cambodian setting
"Das Reisfeld" give very intimate insights into peasant life in Southeast Asia. The villagers, their behaviour, their fears for the harvest etc. are rather well-portrayed. This movie is based on the novel "Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan" (1967) by the well-known Malaysian author Shahnon Ahmad - which is mentioned in the end credits of the film - but set into the Cambodian landscape - IMDb, please do supplement it in the database...
As such I miss several important sequences. The village elder e.g. turned out to be rather corrupt and cold-hearted in Shahnons novel taking his advantage out of the misery of the poor peasant family, this is nearly mentioned at all. Being put into a Cambodian setting I was surprised that Rithy Panh did not put the killing fields somewhere-somehow into the plot. While the novel depicts the fate of peasants in the 60s in Malaysia, at what time this film then is supposed to be? If it should play in Cambodia after 1979 then Cambodian peasants surely had to suffer under the Khmer Rouge-Regime, but there are no political references made throughout the film.
Despite these critical remarks however, the setting is beautiful, the acting well-done and it still makes a not-all-to-bad movie. It would be funny to compare it with Jamil Sulongs Malaysian film of this novel filmed in 1983.
Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (1984)
propaganda film filled with lies
This movie was shown each year on Indonesian TV to perform the national trauma of the incidents of 1965 in Java, Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia. It is a propaganda movie of the New Order of the Indonesian military dictator Soeharto whose rule was established in the aftermath of the mass killings. The movie is filled with lies ignoring historical facts. There was no conspiratorial meeting of the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) right before the kidnapping and killing of six high generals of the Indonesian army. When the dead bodies of the generals had been found a few days later, no signs of torture at all was reported by the doctors and experts involved in the case. This movie had only the intention to justify Soeharto's military regime whose violations of human rights are well-known. That Soeharto's most favorite military historian Nugroho Notosusanto was involved in writing the screenplay is hardly surprising, but to find such highly rated Indonesian intellectuals as Arifin C. Noer (screenplay, was leading in Indonesian theatre in the 1970s) or Umar Kayam (played Sukarno, well-known sociologist and novelist) gives one quite some thoughts on their other artistic and literary works.