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The Killing Fields

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The Killing Fields

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Summary

Biographical war drama starring Sam Waterston, Dr Haing S Ngor and John Malkovich. Cambodia, 1973: American journalist Sydney Schanberg and his guide Dith Pran are operating out of the war-torn ruins of Phnom Penh. When the Khmer Rouge armies enter the city, foreign reporters find themselves the target of hatred and are rounded up, facing the prospect of possible execution.

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IMDB

Review

A star rating of 5 out of 5.

Adrian Turner

Few feature films have captured a nation's agony more dramatically than Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields. It tells the story of Cambodia's Year Zero, when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge entered the capital, Phnom Penh, emptied it, turned the population into serfs and slaughtered nearly three million of them. To tell the story of this genocide, the picture has one conventional aspect - the perspective of American journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) - and one less so - the experiences of his Cambodian stringer, Dith Pran, played by Haing S Ngor, a Cambodian doctor whose own suffering at the time was, if anything, even worse than that depicted in the film. Produced by David Puttnam and co-starring John Malkovich, the picture has scale and humanity - the evacuation of the capital is stunning; Ngor's suffering has great emotional force while Waterston's complex mixture of shame and ambition is compelling. Bruce Robinson's script - he later made Withnail & I - concentrates on the personal rather than the political (the Vietnamese liberation isn't mentioned) and the music is awful, but this is still one of the greatest pictures of the 1980s. Dr Ngor, who won an Oscar, was murdered in Los Angeles in 1996.

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7.8/10

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Credits

Cast

rolenameSydney SchanbergSam WaterstonDith PranHaing S NgorAl RockoffJohn MalkovichJon SwainJulian SandsMilitary attachéCraig T NelsonUS consulSpalding GrayDr MacEntire Bill PatersonDr SundesvalAthol FugardDougalGraham KennedySer Moeun, Pran's wifeKatherine Kragum CheyTitony, Pran's sonOliver PierpaoliSarunEdward Entero CheyUS military adviserTom BirdPhat, Khmer Rouge Leader, second villageMonirak SisowathPhat's sonLambool DtangpaiboolAmbassador WadeIra WheelerFranceDavid HenryMorganPatrick MalahideBethNell CambellTV interviewerJoan Harris

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Crew

rolenameDirectorRoland Joffé

Details

Theatrical distributor

Columbia-Emi-Warner Dists Ltd

Released on

1984-11-23

Languages

English | Khmer | Russian | French

Guidance

Violence and swearing.

Available on

video, DVD and Blu-ray

Formats

Colour

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