Meeting with Pol Pot
By Clarence Tsui
“VERDICT: Rithy Panh’s unnerving screen adaptation of U.S. war correspondent Elizabeth Becker’s real-life 1978 visit to Khmer Rouge-ruled Cambodia vaunts intense performances, a diverse visual palette and an ominous sound design.”
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‘Meeting With Pol Pot’ Review: Reality Unravels in Rithy Panh’s Haunting Historical Fiction
By Siddhant Adlakha
“A chilling historical drama rendered with impeccable sleight of hand, Rithy Panh’s “Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot” (“Meeting With Pol Pot“) reveals its political dimensions through layers of obfuscation. While based partially on real events (and on the writings of American war journalist Elizabeth Becker), it crafts a fictitious tale of three French journalists attempting to interview Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in 1978. Although its outcomes echo the real experiences of Becker, Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell, and American reporter Richard Dudman, the film is as much about a specific moment in time as it is about the mechanics of propaganda, which it refutes and embodies in equal measure.”
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‘Meeting With Pol Pot’ Is a Lesson in Genocide
By Sharon Waxman
“The timing could not be more spot on for “Meeting With Pol Pot,” Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s quiet, powerful drama about three French journalists who visit the war-torn country and discover the horrors being perpetrated by Pol Pot under the dogma of revolutionary change. The film is playing in Cannes’ premiere section and debuted on Thursday night.”
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Journalists get a guided tour of totalitarianism in ‘Meeting with Pol Pot’
By Robert Abele
“French Cambodian director Rithy Panh has often cited the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, which killed his family and from which he escaped, as the reason he’s a filmmaker. His movies aren’t always directly about that wretched time. But when they are — as is his most memorable achievement, the Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary “The Missing Picture,” which re-imagined personal memories using clay-figurine dioramas — one senses a grand mosaic being assembled piece by piece linking devastation, aftermath and remembrance, never to be finished, only further detailed.”
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‘Meeting with Pol Pot’ Review: An Implication-Rich Drama About Hiding a Genocide
By Chris Barsanit
“Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.”
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‘Meeting with Pol Pot’ Film Review: A Keen Reminder of Moral Courage
By Sarah Manvel
“Meeting with Pol Pot is very loosely based on a memoir by an American journalist named Elizabeth Becker, who was at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival. It must have been a very strange feeling to see a fictionalized version of some of the most important events in her life, which hopefully provided an emotional, if not a practical, truth. As in Never Look Away, a documentary about a war journalist, director/co-writer Rithy Panh chose to re-enact some of the unstageable events with dioramas in this fictional film. Somehow, little dolls and a sense of childhood craft can express a horror that more realistic depictions of which would render nearly unwatchable. But this movie, which takes pains to emphasize that it is not a documentary, is also not directly about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. Instead, it focuses on the risks journalists must take to discover the truth and is a keen reminder of the importance of moral courage.”
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‘Meeting With Pol Pot’ Review: Snapshots of Totalitarianism
By Ben Kenigsberg
“The director Rithy Panh dramatizes events from 1978, when a group of outsiders was allowed to enter Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.”
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By Richard Brody
“The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, whose films have long borne witness to the country’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime of the nineteen-seventies (from which he escaped), returns with the drama “Meeting with Pol Pot,” based on a nonfiction book by Elizabeth Becker. It stars Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï as French journalists who, in 1978, rely on political connections to interview the titular dictator. One reporter, a Marxist, plans to ask tough questions sympathetically; another is openly skeptical of the regime; and a third brazenly plans to leave his minders behind. The results, naturally, are tragic; Panh combines sharply observed action with archival footage and diorama-like re-creations—complete with clay figurines—of horrors that went undepicted.(Film at Lincoln Center.)“
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The Best Movies of 2025 (So Far)
By Alison Willmore, Bilge Ebiri, and Angelica Jade Bastién
New York Magazine Named Meeting with Pol Pot one of the best movies of 2025 so far!
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