Meeting With Pol Pot Explores How Ideology Can Curdle Into Evil

Photo: Strand Releasing/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who as a boy lost his whole family to the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s, has understandably made the country’s grim history one of the central subjects of his filmmaking career. (His 2013 documentary about this era, The Missing Picture, built out of archival footage and clay figurines, was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.) In Meeting With Pol Pot, he presents a fictionalized version...