A peak into Year Zero

Missing Picture (Documentary, 2013)

Another award winning documentary showcasing the evil that men do to each other in the name trying to save his country from the clutches of the enemy. Or is it a wrong choice of strategy (ideology) that blew right on the face? In order to right the wrong, the 'liberators' dug themselves deeper and deeper into their own grave.
At a time when the world was paranoid with the threat of a new ideology sweeping over the newly independent nations of South East Asia, Big Brother, as the self appointed saviour of mankind, tried against old odds to maintain their capitalistic brand of freedom in Indo China. The retreating communist rebels who fled into Cambodia were heavily bombarded by American bombs. The collateral damage on the side of the innocent peasants were too much, prompting them to fall prey to the promises of Pol Pot. After being enslaved for generations from the reign of the Chola kingdom all through to the French colonial masters, the people had enough. When the stomach growls and famine was an imminent threat, it was easy for them to be suckered into the promise of a new dawn where they would be masters of their own land. Equality was promised and classes were to be abolished.
Unfortunately, new Phnom Penh Government was defeated by Khmer Rouge on 17th April 1975 and Year Zero started, people realised that they had been taken for a ride. They had entered a dark era in the history of their civilisation.
This film is an interesting presentation by a survivor of 'The Killing Fields' who decide to tell his side of the story with the help of old propaganda films and clay dolls to reenact a time before 1975 when life in Phnom Penh was a bustling happy town. He fills up the 'missing pictures' in the era by remodelling dolls to create the happy times before his family members perished.
The Cambodians, like their predecessors in China during the Cultural Revolution, were hoodwinked into believing that they were self sufficient. Modern medicine and modern technology was bad. They had all it took to be a progressive nation. All of them had to toil day and night in the fields, exposed to elements of nature with little to go around. Paranoia and torture was the flavour of the times.

Some still believed in the promise but others re-live the living hell even to date. The believers seem to be hopeful of finding the eternal equality and truth for all mankind. They do not mind the human and social experiments all in the name of national pride. They just fail to accept that their doctrine had failed.
Quite many a time, the narrator reminisce the happier times when people were happy, people were singing, music was heard in Phnom Penh. Laughter seem to be something from the distant past. The moral guardians of the Revolution had not only abandoned education for masses, they had also outlawed musical instruments. Food rationing was taken to the limit that people found with 'luxury' items like mangoes and fresh fish were reprimanded severely. As the revolution believed that the land has the ability to feed man, everyone was forcibly worked in the fields, irrespective of their qualifications.
A sad presentation that reminds us of the mistakes that we had done to each other all in the name of national pride and defence of a piece of cloth and ideology!