#chris menges

Comfort and Joy (1984)

[letterboxd | imdb]

Director: Bill Forsyth

The Mission (1986) Dir. Roland Joffé, Dir. Chris Menges

The Killing Fields was released on 2 November 1984.

Based on Sydney Schanberg's The Death and Life of Dith Pran, his 1980 account of his colleague's persecution by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, producer David Puttnam had difficulty finding someone to make the film until he talked with Roland Joffé, who had television experience, but had never directed a feature film.

According to Julian Sands, Joffé wanted to cast actors without much experience, including John Malkovich, and Haing S. Ngor - who had been imprisoned in Cambodia before escaping - as Dith Pran, and Spalding Gray (who would use his experience to create his monologue Swimming to Cambodia). Sam Waterston was cast as Schanberg.

While some of the real-life participants of the historical events criticized the film for its inaccuracies, The Killing Fields was a commercial and critical success. It was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Waterston), and Best Screenplay (Bruce Robinson).

In 1975, after the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian national Dith Pran, translator and journalistic partner of New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, was plunged into the terror of Pol Pot’s oppressive and brutal prison camps. The Killing Fields (1984), the first major western film to confront the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide, dramatizes Pran’s…