Thet thought that finding people who took part in some of the massacres would help him understand and heal. In the end, those who opened up to him, revealing atrocities they have kept secret from even their wives and children, also seemed to benefit.
“I want to reveal to you all the killers I know,” said Soun, who also talks at one point about drinking the bitter bile from victims’ gall bladders to gain strength.
“When we find them, and they confess the truth, I feel better,” Thet days. “I want this documentary to be shown all over the country, in the provinces, in the cities. Then the people who were killers in the regime will come forward and say, ‘Ya, I used to do that, too.’”
“Otherwise we will be gone soon, and the new generation won’t know the story,” Thet added.
In one of the most chilling scenes, Thet asks Soun to demonstrate how he killed people. A man lies on his stomach as the former militia commander, at first embarrassed, steps on his back and pulls up his head up. He takes a plastic knife and draws it across his victim’s throat.
“You hold them like this so that they cannot scream,” Soun says, slowly gaining confidence. “Sometimes I did it another way, because after I slit so many throats like this my hand ached, so I switched to stabbing the neck.”
It took years for Thet to win Nuon Chea’s full trust.
By the end, the two have formed an unquestionable bond. The war crimes court reviewing Nuon Chea’s case has asked for a copy of the film — coproduced by Thet and Briton Rob Lemkin — but he refused, saying he feels it would be a betrayal of trust.
Thet brings Soun and another man who has admitted to ordering countless killings to visit Nuon Chea so they can ask him directly why so many people had to die at their hands. They ask, too, if they themselves might end up in court.
“They are not after people like you,” Nuon Chea says in a grandfatherly manner, adding that they should not feel bad about what they did. After all, they were trying to help save the nation.
“You were the fighters, and you should be proud,” he says, adding that according to Buddhist teachings, their intentions were honorable, so they need not fear punishment now, or in their next lives.
But the tormented Soun is not convinced.
“I don’t know what I’ll be reborn as in the next life,” he says. “How many holes must I go through before I can be reborn as a human being again. I feel desperate, but I don’t know what to do.”
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