'The Killing Fields' Depicted Genocide
Published: February 2, 2009
"The Killing Fields," a 1984 movie about the wartime life of journalist Dith Pran, explored the horrors inflicted by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.
The movie portrayed the experiences of Dith and Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times correspondent, who covered the encroaching civil war in Cambodia from 1972 to 1975. Dith and Schanberg stayed after Americans and their Cambodian dependents were evacuated from Phnom Penh on April 12, 1975, and covered the fall of the capital to the Khmer Rouge.
The pair and two other journalists were arrested by the communist regime, but Dith was able to convince the Khmer Rouge that the other three were neutral French journalists. Dith was exiled to the killing fields, the forced labor camps in the Cambodian countryside where he was starved and tortured for four years. He escaped to Thailand in 1979, and in 1980 became a photographer for The New York Times. Dith died in 2008.
Schanberg received a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Cambodia.
Source: www.dithpran.org
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