Ancient history

Funan, the horror of the Khmer Rouge in animation

Funan, distributed in Spain by Alfa Pictures, is the feature debut by Denis Do , a young French director of Cambodian origin, who has been acclaimed at several festivals, including the award for best feature film at the Annecy Festival. In this article we tell you our impressions of a film that has dared, through animation, to tell one of the great atrocities of the 20th century:the genocide of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge regime and Pol Pot.

History takes us to Phnom Penh , in 1975, and tells us the story of Chou and his family who, due to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, is deported along with the rest of the city to work in the rice fields in a forced way. However, during the evacuation, due to the brutality and intransigence of the guerrillas, Chou is forced to separate from her son Sovanh . Chou and her husband end up in one of the labor camps and her son in another.

As the synopsis anticipates, we find ourselves before a social film that bears witness to a situation suffered by millions of Cambodians. The country, from 1975 to 1979, under the name of Democratic Kampuchea , generated a forced exodus from the city to the countryside to create an agrarian country free, according to its leaders, from any Western or bourgeois influence, judged anti-revolutionary. The film offers a brilliant and accurate portrait of the conditions that the population had to live during that forced ruralization. Entire families were separated, hundreds of thousands died en route from fatigue, malnutrition or shelling. And when they reach the rice fields, they are forced to work during inhuman days, in precarious conditions and without rest. Funan immerses us in this context and masterfully recounts this situation so that it is not forgotten. It is a heartbreaking cry of impotence in the face of a genocide that even today still has unanswered questions.

But also, Funan manages to make a human portrait within this barbarism. Because the story revolves around Chou after losing her son. Despite the devastating blow that the separation of her and Sovanh, who is 4 years old, implies, Chou does not lose hope, and in the midst of the routine of the forced labor camps, he looks for a way to escape to reunite with her son. Denis Do also emerges victorious from this family drama. He accurately portrays the intimate side of this story, which is also based on real events. The search of a mother to find her son excites us, angers us and fills us with hope. How, during a genocide, the population manages to maintain hope and overcome to achieve a better future.

Special mention deserves the animation, which shines with its own light. Making use of the most traditional means, the director manages to impress great beauty on the shots, which shows that animation is not at odds with realism. Without a doubt, Funan joins the tradition of political animation cinema that has given great results such as Waltz with Bashir , One more day alive or Grave of the Fireflies . The emotional charge of the film is enormous and the animation guides us through a torrent of emotions that lead, in a cathartic way, to the final stretch of the work.

Without a doubt, we are facing one of the most interesting releases of this first half of 2019. An unusual film, a cry of denunciation of one of the horrors of the stormy 20th century, which manages to convey to the viewer the horrible living conditions during the Khmer Rouge regime. A necessary film, narrated with a good narrative pulse and with characters that draw the best and the worst of the human condition while documenting a time in Cambodia in which totalitarianism gained power and tried to carry out its ideals of forging a new man. Hopefully movies like Funan serve as a warning to prevent similar horrors from reappearing.