Nothing to Forgive
The cover photo of Susie Linfield's book The Cruel Radiance, which explores the interplay between photography and political violence, sent me down a deep rabbit hole. The portrait shows a young Cambodian girl who was executed by the Khmer Rouge shortly afterward. Her gaze is calm, hopeful, and endlessly haunting. My resulting amateur research into the bloody civil war led me to the 1984 biographical film The Killing Fields. In it, the two journalists Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran witness the fall of Phnom Penh to the rebel army nearly ten years earlier, and the utterly senseless genocide of the population that followed. The Killing Fields is as visually powerful as it is thrilling in its depiction of man-made horror. It will stay with me for a long time.