The Killing Fields (1984) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The Killing Fields is a true story, with very little if any fictional embellishment, about journalists in Phnom Penh during the transition of Cambodia to the Pol Pot regime in 1975. 

The Cambodian people must be the most persecuted and suffering in the second half of the twentieth century.

• First they were in the way when the North Vietnamese needed bases to stage attacks into South Vietnam.
• Then they found themselves in the way of American bombs when Nixon attacked the alleged North Vietnamese camps and supply lines in Cambodia. You may have heard of this. It began as Nixon's so-called "Secret Bombing".
• The people were filled with joy when the Khmer Rouge won their revolution against the government, but Pol Pot proved to be crueler to his own people than any outsider had ever been (1975-79)
• Then the Vietnamese invaded again in 1978, and eventually ousted the Khmer Rouge from power
• The Khmer Rouge continued to fight a guerrilla fight for pretty much the rest of the century.

Meanwhile, the United States was attacking Vietcong positions and supply lines across the Cambodian border. The Americans bombed Cambodia, a neutral country, without a declaration of war from march 1969 until 1973. In the last analysis, this proved helpful to the Cambodian left-wing, because the pressure of the American attacks did not drive the Vietcong back to Vietnam, but rather deeper into Cambodia, where they ended up joining forces with the Khmer Rouge, thus strengthening them.

Finally, with the Vietnamese war over, the Americans having withdrawn, and Nixon having resigned, the Khmer Rouge won the revolutionary struggle, captured the capital city of Phnom Penh, and sealed it off to the outside world, eventually making it a virtual ghost town by relocating its inhabitants to the countryside. This proved to be the worst luck yet for Cambodians. Pol Pot had studied communist ideology and planned to turn Cambodia into a successful agrarian society (he abolished the concept of money, for example), so he took millions of city dwellers and relocated them to hard labor camps in the countryside. About two million Cambodians died as a result of this failed farming experiment, the so-called "Killing Fields"

Soon thereafter (1978), the Vietnamese and Cambodians had their own intra-communist split over border raids, and Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Phnom Penh fell again, the regime was handed over to Khmer rouge defectors, while Pol Pot and the main body of the Rouge retreated to the Thai border, where they kept fighting for another 15 years, until a U.N.-supervised democratic election. Traces of their group remained until Pot's death in 1998.

Two of the most famous works about the 1975-1979 era, when the Khmer Rouge held power and the agrarian genocide took place, formed the basis for this movie:

Journalist Sydney Schanberg's, "The Death and Life of Dith Pran", in the New York Times Magazine.

Dith Pran's own "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields".

Schanberg and Pran are the two main characters in this recreation of the 1975 fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, and its aftermath, in which Pran himself was forced into, and subsequently escaped from, a labor camp.

The movie is powerful and involving for a biopic, for three main reasons:

1. it wisely concentrates only on the two main characters and it makes their personal struggles the core of the movie and the surrogate for the more global issues. They didn't try to Hollywoodize it with a love story or to give it a backdrop of fictional characters.
2. it has a painfully accurate recreation of some of the most frightening scenes in history, coupled with the struggle of the two journalists, first to cover the story, then to stay alive. The tension is maintained by the viewers involvement in their plight, feeling their fear as they are captured, sharing their hope as they seem have a plan to escape, sharing their joy when the tension is lifted.
3. it has an exceptionally effective musical score, which is actually irritating and nerve-rattling, but which appropriately exacerbates the tension in the key scenes. I have rarely seen music used more effectively in a movie. The score really made the whole movie exciting rather than merely scholarly and historical.

Although the film is not conceived as an entertainment film, it is cinematically structured, and manages to succeed very well as a political thriller, simply because of the tension inherent in so many scenes. I was trembling as I watched certain scenes in this movie. Pran's escape from the labor camp, as he crosses a haunted lake of human remains and driftwood, is one of the most powerful scenes in cinema history.