The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock’s Lost Rock Queen

Too often, the media and Twitter (X) users just shrug their shoulders at genocide, so we inevitably get more of it, like Hamas’s horrifying genocidal terrorist attacks still rocking Israel. It is time to face up to genocidal crimes and the ideologies that commit them, from the CCP’s systemic campaign against the Uyghurs to the Marxist Khmer Rouge, who decimated Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals. Sadly, the widely popular vocalist Ros Serey Sothea was one of them. Gregory Cahill tells her story in the graphic novel The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock’s Lost Rock Queen, illustrated by Kat Baumann, which goes on-sale today.

You might know the basic facts of the singer’s life from the documentary, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock & Roll. Many of the details are Cahill’s speculation, but reasonably based on the circumstances of Cambodian history. The “Golden Voice,” as she was dubbed, was nationally beloved, because she was a country girl who made good. However, that would not earn her much slack from the Khmer Rouge, especially given her tumultuous relationship with one of Lon Nol’s married officers.

Three quarters of the graphic novel covers events prior to the Khmer Rouge genocide. That might make it sound less depressing, but she still endured plenty of pain and struggle during her professional life. Regardless, the inevitable tragic end hangs over the entire narrative.

In fact, the ways Cahill fills in the gaps in Sothea’s life seem highly credible and well thought out. Conversely, his creation of two American “non-advising” military advisors read like mouthpieces for historical exposition and the writer’s opinion on American policy.

AAIFF ’16: Daze of Justice

The stakes are high, but the proceedings of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal are often tediously dry. To some extent, the legalistic tone is necessary, but it often plays into the hands of the Communist Khmer Rouge defendants, who wish to keep the truth bottled up. Remarkably, Hong Siu Pheng came back for more. He watched the prosecution of his father, Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a. “Comrade Duch,” from the protected chambers provided for family members, but he will return to witness the trial of Nuon Chea and three other high ranking war criminals with survivors of the genocide. It will be a difficult experience, but it precipitates small, highly personal steps towards reconciliation in Michael Siv’s Daze of Justice (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Asian American International Film Festival in New York.

In hopes that the truth will finally come out, Cal State Long Beach Professor Leakhena Nou recruited several aging survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide to confront the accused in court. Siv, the son of a survivor, will document their journey as an observer. However, the story takes an unexpected turn when Hong Siu Pheng agrees the accompany them during the trial. 

He clearly lives a hardscrabble life with his family in the provinces, so the survivors cannot accuse him of benefiting from his father’s connections. Frustratingly, he apparently learned little from his father’s tribunal, judging from the bland, relativistic platitudes he repeats. However, he quickly changes his tune when he finally visits the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where his father oversaw the constant torture and executions, as well as the Choeng Ek Killing Fields memorial. It is like he literally deflates on screen.

Although they are obviously wary around each other, the survivors direct little overt hostility towards the mass murderer’s son and vice versa. Belatedly, Hong Siu Pheng seems to finally face up to his uncomfortable family history, which also happens to be deeply troubling national history. For the good Professor, he clearly represents the nation in microcosm. Unfortunately, it just isn’t practical to take every deliberately misinformed citizen on a similar excursion, but that is presumably why Siv and his cameras were welcomed into such private moments.

Hong Siu Pheng is indeed a deeply compelling figure, who carries the stigma of his father’s crimes, but holds none of the culpability. The doc obliquely questions just how much the Tribunal’s heart is in these prosecutions, without sounding paranoid and conspiratorial. Daze is sympathetic towards all innocent parties (broadly defined), while capturing the hushed eeriness that now hangs over Tuol Sleng and Choeng Ek. It is a highly personal film, but it also holds wider national significance for Cambodia. Respectfully recommended, the sixty-nine-minute Daze of Justice screens this Sunday (7/24) at the Village East, as part of this year’s AAIFF.

Lost Child—Sayon’s Journey, on PBS

By now, everyone should fully understand the Khmer Rouge killed approximately two million Cambodians (maybe more) in their attempt to create an agrarian socialist utopia. However, there are thousands of forgotten victims of Pol Pot’s reign of terror. They are the child soldiers who were abducted by the Khmer Rouge and forced to commit atrocities (sometimes against their own families). One former child soldier finally returns to Cambodia in search of his long lost family ties. Filmmaker Janet Gardner documents Sayon Soeun’s homecoming in Lost Child: Sayon’s Journey (trailer here), which airs this Thursday on New York’s Thirteen.

Abducted at the age of six, Soeun arguably got off easier than many child soldiers, both in terms of what he was required to do and the punishments he suffered. Nevertheless, it was all more than sufficiently brutal to cause long term psychological scarring. Again, Soeun was comparatively fortunate to be adopted by an American family. Effectively denied the basic coming of age process in Cambodia, the teenaged Soeun would emotionally mature in tandem with his new two year-old sister.

While Soeun had a spot of trouble in his early adult years, he soon settled down into a stable and productive life as a social worker and family man. Just as the limited genocide trials began to make international news, Soeun gets word he might just have surviving family after all. In fact, it would be quite a large, extended family. Although skeptical, Soeun hastens to investigate, bringing along his sister-in-law, co-producer Sopheap Theam, while his wife remained to care for their newborn.

In many ways, the tone of Lost Child is not unlike various survivor homecoming documentaries, such as Blinky & Me and Here I Learned to Love. Unlike Thet Sambath in Enemies of the People, he is not searching for cathartic confrontation or higher truths. He would simply like to feel a familial connection again.

Despite references to terrible crimes against humanity, Gardner and Theam only focus on good, decent people. Granted, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the memories of Soeun’s prospective family, but that is not so unusual given the extreme circumstances they endured. Viewers can be assured there will be some closure at the end of Lost Son.

Marking the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh and the start of the Killing Fields era of mass murder, Lost Child is a timely reminder of the dangers of utopian collectivist movements. While it is intimate in scope, Soeun still speaks frankly about the horrors he witnessed. Indeed, viewers can directly see how macro events devastatingly impact discrete macro lives. Recommended for mainstream documentary watchers, Lost Child: Sayon’s Journey airs on WNET 13 this Thursday night (4/30) and on Boston’s WGBX44 this Saturday (5/2). Check local listings for further dates nationwide.

Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: When Phnom Penh Rocked

Before the Khmer Rouge take-over, Phnom Penh was a happening city, particularly if you were a musician. Once their reign of terror commenced, the city was the worst possible place to be from, especially for musicians. The few surviving veterans of the Phnom Penh music scene reflect on the lives and culture lost during the period of Maoist mass murder in John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (trailer here), which opens tomorrow at Film Forum.

Frankly, it is a revelation just what a swinging good time it was in the capitol city during the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the early 1970s. There was a healthy nightlife, creating beaucoup jobs for musicians and singers. There was Pen Ran, who specialized in the sort of cute pop stylings you could also find on the American charts in the early sixties. Everyone loved Ros Serey Sothea, because she was the country girl that made good. Actually, the early stages of her career were a little rocky, but everything fell into place when she joined forces with popular bandleader Sinn Sisamouth.

Stylistically, Cambodian rock and pop followed a similar development pattern as it did in the west, except maybe not quite as heavy. Regardless, Pou Vannary made her name with hit covers of western songs, incorporating both the original English lyrics and Khmer translations. The scene rocked, but it looks and sounds like star vocalists often still fronted full bands, which was cool. Of course, we know it will end in incomprehensible tragedy and death.

DTIF is at its best surveying the Cambodian rock scene, giving viewers a good sense of each artist’s personal sound. Unfortunately, Pirozzi’s devotes a lot of time to an overly simplistic rehashing of early 1970s history. It is problematically reductive to say America bombed Viet Cong in Cambodia, therefore Pol Pot necessarily killed two million people. After all, a Communist conquest was exactly what the American government wanted to avoid.

Regardless, when Pirozzi sticks with the music and the oral history of survivors, DTIF is on rock-solid ground. Especially moving is the sequence chronicling Cheam Chansovannary’s radio performance of “Oh! Phnom Penh” when the city was finally recolonized after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.

One striking aspect of DTIF is just how much of the music has survived, at least when compared to the almost entirely devastated Cambodian cinematic heritage. Watching Davy Chou’s masterful documentary Golden Slumbers will give audiences a sense of how average Cambodians deeply mourn the loss of their beloved movies on a personal level. While Chou’s elegant elegy is the considerably superior film, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten is still well worth seeing when it opens tomorrow (4/22) in New York, at Film Forum.

NYAFF ’12: Golden Slumbers

Martin Scorsese needs to dispatch an emergency film preservation team to Cambodia.  From 1960 to 1975 about 450 films were produced in the Southeast Asian country.  However, only about thirty films survived the Khmer Rouge.  The Chinese-backed Communists considered cinema just another form of capitalist decadence (which is sort of true when it is really good).  NYAFF special guest Davy Chou surveys what was lost with the handful of surviving film industry veterans in his outstanding documentary Golden Slumbers (trailer here), which screens during the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival.

Despite seeming to have an “in” as the grandson of once prominent Cambodian director Vann Chan, many of the filmmakers who were able to escape execution (most of whom endured harsh transit conditions en-route to France) were initially reluctant to talk to Chou.  However, Yvon Hem eventually relents, taking Chou on a tour of his long abandoned Bird of Paradise studio (named for the Marcel Camus film that launched many film careers in the country, including his own).  Less reticent is Dy Saveth, the former Elizabeth Taylor of Cambodian film, now working as a dance instructor.  To this day, the hill where she once filmed a climactic scene still bears her name.

Obviously the genocidal murders and forced labor camps are the greater crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime.  Yet, the devastation of the nation’s cinema is not merely a footnote to the wider tragedy—it is a tragedy onto itself.  Listening to the movie patrons and movie-makers discussing their beloved films, now presumably lost forever, is deeply moving.  Clearly, lives and livelihoods were lost, but average Cambodian’s treasured memories and cultural heritage have also been destroyed by an ideology of death.  Watching Slumbers stirs the same emotions as the sight of a charred family photo album at a fire scene.

Slumbers also bear an unexpected but apt comparison to Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film, featuring many directors and actors forced to relate their films like oral history.  Yet Chou is able to convey a sense of them through movies posters, radio commercials, and soundtrack records (many of which remain widely popular).  He also stages his talking head interviews in ways that are often quite visually striking, making Slumbers unusually stylish, by documentary standards.

For any movie lover, the loss of any nation’s cinematic legacy is truly lamentable, but it is particularly so in this case.  From the tantalizing descriptions heard throughout Slumbers, many of the popular Cambodian films of the pre-Khmer Rouge era sound like high-end Bollywood, but incorporating darker supernatural and mythological elements.  Though it is impossible to know with certainty, if you are attending other NYAFF screenings, there is indeed a strong likelihood these films would have been your cup of tea.

One can only hope Chou’s documentary leads to the re-discovery of some of these lost treasures in forsaken film vaults someplace.  Nonetheless, as a film in its own right, Slumbers is quite accomplished.  It is an intelligently constructed and elegantly executed cinematic elegy that absolutely puts to shame the vacuous tributes to Hollywood glamour of recent vintage.  Profoundly moving, Slumbers is one of the best documentaries selected for a major festival this year.  Earning the highest of recommendations, Golden Slumbers screens this coming Tuesday (7/10) at the Walter Reade Theater.

HRWFF ’12: Brother Number One

For one New Zealander, a Canadian, and a British subject sailing through Asia, straying off course became a capital crime.  It was their profound misfortune to anchor within the territorial waters of Cambodia while the country was held in the inhuman grip of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or the Khmer Rouge as they would subsequently be known.  In 2007, Rob Hamill had the opportunity to testify on behalf of his late brother in the first trial of a Khmer Rouge official for crimes against humanity.  Annie Goldson followed Hamill’s quest for justice, or at least a measure of closure, in Brother Number One (trailer here), one of a handful of must see films at this year’s typically uneven 2012 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.

The film’s title carries a rather odd double meaning.  Pol Pot, the Robespierre of the nationwide genocide, was dubbed “Brother Number One” in Communist propaganda, whereas Kerry Hamill was the first of three brothers.  Charismatic and athletic, the elder Hamill brother left New Zealand in search of seafaring adventure.  The 1970’s still felt like the 1960’s for him and his mates, who were largely oblivious to the horrors underway in Cambodia.

Canadian Stuart Glass was killed during the attack on their small yacht, which was probably a small mercy.  Hamill and the British John Dewhirst were captured and transferred to the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, commanded by Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a. “Comrade Duch.”  In his own words, Duch’s prisoners were to be “smashed.”  This entailed torture, the extraction of a false confession, and an agonizingly slow execution.

As he prepares his “Civil Party” statement, Hamill visits the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and talks to the handful of survivors, getting a painful sense of his brother’s final months.  He also interviews several former Khmer Rouge officials, who are not exactly forthcoming.  More satisfying are his meetings with Dewhirst’s sister and his brother’s girlfriend, bonding through their shared grief.

Though it is an intensely personal story, Brother vividly establishes the scale and ferocity of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror.  The walls of victim photographs at Tuol Sleng speak for themselves. We do learn a bit about Duch, the subject of The Bookkeeper of Death (recently seen on PBS World), but Rob Hamill is appropriately granted the floor throughout the documentary.  Frankly, it is quite amazing how well he keeps it together as he confronts the ghosts haunting his family.

An Olympic rower at the Atlanta games, Rob Hamill is indeed a compelling POV figure.  He certainly puts a human face on the nearly inconceivable tragedy of so-called “Democratic Kampuchea.”  Yet, the documentary never feels manipulative or exploitative.  Goldson wisely stays out of the picture, resisting the temptation of putting any sort of explicitly personal stamp on the film.  Nor are there moments of quiet observational slack.  Brother has a compelling narrative, which Goldson and her co-director-dp Peter Gilbert and co-editor James Brown hew to quite tightly.

Brother Number One clearly illustrates how vicious ideology can be.  It also reminds viewers how one murder can devastate an entire family.  As for resolution, that is another matter entirely.  That is indeed why Brother Number One is a timely and important film.  One of three highly recommended films at this year’s New York edition of HRWFF, along with Salaam Dunk and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, it screens this coming Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (6/19-6/21) at the Walter Reade Theater, with Goldson and Hamill in attendance all three nights.

Elusive Justice: Comrade Duch

Somewhat fittingly, the English translation of Tuol Sleng is “Hill of the Poisonous Trees.”  During the reign of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or the Khmer Rouge as they were subsequently known, the Tuol Sleng prison was a true charnel house, ostensibly charged with enforcing ideological purity.  Kaing Guek Eav, the man dubbed “Comrade Duch,” oversaw the wholesale torture and mass executions perpetrated there with the ferocity of a zealot.  Years later, Duch became the first Khmer Rouge official to stand trial for crimes against humanity.  Adrain Maben documents the historic trial and the complicated circumstances surrounding it in Comrade Duch: The Bookkeeper of Death (promo here), which airs tomorrow as part of the current season of Global Voices on PBS World.

Duch was a butcher, plain and simple.  However, he represented himself as a much different person in 2007 than he was in the late 1970’s.  A convert to Evangelical Christianity, Duch initially surprised the world by acknowledging personal culpability for the crimes he committed and asking for the forgiveness of victims and their families.  Indeed, it seemed to confuse the issues for the tribunal, which eventually sentenced Duch to what most of the country considered a scandalously lenient sentence.

Trying a nearly seventy year old man for crimes that were committed decades ago but still remain a source of acute and widespread pain throughout the country will always be a tricky proposition.  Problematic as it might have been, Duch’s trial was only possible thanks to the gumshoe work of investigative photojournalist Nic Dunlop (who contributed so many images to HBO2’s Burma Soldier has was officially credited as a co-director).  Haunted by the archival photos of soon to be executed Tuol Sleng prisoners, Dunlop scoured the remote corners of Southeast Asia for the notorious ideologue responsible.

While the trial is presented rather straightforwardly and dispassionately, there are several heavy moments in Bookkeeper.  In one telling scene, Duch earnestly tells his interviewer his only fundamental mistake was serving Communism rather than Christianity.  It is hard to imagine a more Eric Hoffer-esque moment, yet there is no question the world would have been a better place had his allegiances been altered accordingly.  It is also a little unnerving to take into account Duch was the product of his leftist school teacher’s classroom indoctrination.

Arguably, Bookkeeper illustrates the power of the photographic image more forcefully than any recent film expressly documenting the medium.  Profoundly saddening but respectful and informative, it is one of this weekend’s television highlights when it airs tomorrow (5/20) on PBS World.

Voices from the Killing Fields: Enemies of the People

Euphemisms can be terrible instruments of evil. For instance, when former Khmer Rouge cadres speak of “solving problems” what they really refer to is the systematic torture and execution of roughly two million Cambodians, whose only crime was to be deemed insufficiently Communist. Thet Sambath understands this all too well. After losing his parents and brother to the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, he spent years interviewing former cadres to understand why they killed their countrymen. His self-funded investigation ultimately resulted in Enemies of the People (trailer here), a truly newsworthy documentary co-directed by Rob Lemkin, which opens in New York this Friday.

A newspaper journalist in Phnom Penh, Sambath’s quiet unassuming demeanor is perfectly suited to winning the confidences of his interview subjects. However, he does not advertize his tragic family history, especially not with the big fish, Nuon Chea, a.k.a. Brother Number Two, the Khmer Rouge’s chief theoretician, second only to Pol Pot (Brother Number One). For years, the largely silent Chea has maintained his ignorance of the Killing Fields, but Sambath wore down his reticence. With Chea facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, what he says on Sambath’s tapes is extraordinarily timely.

Beyond its potential relevance in the Cambodian Tribunal, Enemies is highly significant as a pioneering Cambodian documentary inquiry into the Khmer Rouge’s crimes. Providing historical context that will likely be instructive for western audiences as well, Sambath explains the Khmer Rouge directly looked to China as their revolutionary inspiration. Indeed, one can argue the Killing Fields were an indirect product of the Cultural Revolution.

The former low level cadres interviewed on camera also confirm their victims were brutalized and murdered out of ideological zeal. They were capitalist or counter-revolutionary “problems” to “fix.” The matter-of-factness of their videotaped statements is quite chilling, lending credence to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. While some express remorse, decades after the fact, for the most part, it seems like Sambath is not tapping into feelings of guilt but a Dostoevskian compulsion to confess. Obviously suffering from his own survivor’s guilt, Sambath also has his own stories to tell. However, he appears to attain a measure of closure through his ambitious undercover research project.

In Enemies, Sambath puts to shame most western journalists who simply preen in front of cameras and regurgitate talking points. At no small risk to himself, he set out to get the truth, succeeding rather spectacularly given his modest resources. Frankly, the ignorance and misunderstanding of the Khmer Rouge borders on the criminal in the west, but Sambath and Lemkin bring their genocidal crimes into sharp focus. Thoughtful and legitimately bold, Enemies opens this Friday (7/30) at the Quad.

On-Stage: Sweet Karma

Academy Award-winning actor and physician Dr. Haing S. Ngor’s 1996 murder in apparent hold-up attempt seemed like a case of fate gone cosmically out-of-synch. To survive the real life “Killing Fields” of the Cambodia Marxist Khmer Rouge regime Dr. Ngor had to endure the unthinkable. The question of how such desperate decisions made in nightmarish landscapes affects one’s karma (particularly in the Theravada Buddhist tradition which had long-dominated Cambodia) drives Henry Ong’s insightful play Sweet Karma, now running at the Studio Theatre in Queens Theatre in the Park.

Dr. Vichear Lam is not Dr. Ngor, but he certainly bears a close resemblance in a Law & Order kind of way. Indeed, both doctors were forced to conceal their medical training just to stay alive as the Khmer Rouge’s cruel ideology ran amok. Dr. Lam similarly lost his wife Arun under especially soul-trying circumstances while they were interned in one of Pol Pot’s reeducation-work camps. In turn, Lam also came to America as a refugee, eventually finding unlikely Hollywood glory in a film much like Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. In a final tragic parallel, it appears Lam is also about to be killed in a senseless act of street violence as Karma opens.

When a woman appears before him, Lam assumes she is one of the devas, Buddhist demigods who help the dying coming to terms with their past in order to harmonize their karma. However, “No Name” seems oddly emotionally invested in Lam’s story for an ostensibly dispassionate spirit guide. Like Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past, No Name takes the doctor on a revealing tour of his past, visiting some scenes of triumph but focusing on painful incidents from his life with Arun.

In the demanding role of Lam, JoJo Gonzalez conveys a remarkable combination of survivor’s everything: guilt, pain, remorse, fear, and sorrow. He is effectively complimented by Bonna Tek, who gives a touching performance as Arun, maintaining a sense of credible humanity in what could have easily been a tragically noble stock character. Tina Chilip also hits some intriguing notes as No Name, nicely handling the play’s dramatic revelations, while Constance Parng (a NY Innovative Theater award winner for her supporting turn in Lee/gendary) and Brian Hirono prove quite flexible, vividly animating the many other characters Lam encounters in his eventful life.

Marcy Arlin’s fluid direction smoothly leads the audience through the many narrative jumps and effectively evokes the oppressiveness of Khmer Rouge Cambodia. While Lam’s story is obviously inspired by Ngor’s life, Ong still manages to spring a few big-picture surprises as the play unfolds. Despite the constant flashbacks, his script is quite tight and compelling. It is a thoughtful meditation on life, death, and the karma connecting them both that ought to appeal to fans of Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come (the book, not the messy film adaptation.)

Karma really gives a sense of what it is like emotionally to experience the horrors Lam (as a stand-in for Ngor) endured. It also offers some fascinating speculation about the Karmic repercussions of such “survival.” Thoughtfully conceived and well mounted by the Immigrants’ Theatre Project, Karma is a very satisfying production. Highly recommended, it is now officially open, running through December 20th at Queens Theatre in the Park.

(Photos: 2009 Amy Davis)

Opening Soon: Terror’s Advocate

What do Pol Pot, Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, the Red Army Faction, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have in common, besides violent ideologies? They had the same attorney: Jacques Vergès, the subject of a new documentary, Terror’s Advocate.

Directed by Barbet Schroeder, Advocate includes extensive interview footage with its cooperative subject and many of his past associates. Vergès gained worldwide notoriety for his defense of the Nazi war criminal Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, essentially using the proceedings to establish a moral equivalence between Barbie’s crimes and those of French colonialists in Algiers. However, Vergès is a Zelig of evil, turning up with nearly every violent extremist group of the last fifty years.

Advocate presents the framework of a unified theory of collectivist evil, tracing connections between German National Socialism, Communism, and Islamic Fascism. The film sketches out links between Vergès and François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi who became a champion of Palestinian causes, Waddi Haddad of the Maoist PFLP, Johannes Weinrich of the Red Army Faction, and the KGB recruited Carlos the Jackal.

The interrelations between the various factions of terror are fascinating. It is clear from voluminous STASI records that East Germany authorities allowed Carlos and his PFLP and Red Army Faction allies to operate within their country, where Vergès would visit them. They were under constant STASI surveillance, but their operations were not disrupted.

Genoud was converted to the Palestinian cause through his dealings with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on behalf of the National Socialists. In 1969 he picked up the tab for Vergès’ defense of the notorious PFLP Zurich El-Al hijackers. Years later, he would underwrite Vergès’ defense of Barbie.

Advocate is strongest when illustrating these alliances between the malignant ideologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It certainly does no favors for the image of France. On one hand, Vergès and his allies pillory France’s record on Algerian, while from the other perspective, we see a feckless Mitterand government kick loose Anis Naccache, a Vergès client convicted of an attempted assassination of a former Shah minister at the Ayatollah’s bequest, for political expediency, in an episode the film dubs the birth of Islamic terrorism against the west (and Vergès was there). (The film’s website is quite helpful providing some crib notes on the various satellites of terror in orbit around Vergès.)

However, the film’s approach to Vergès as an interview subject is not as successful. Schroeder follows the same strategy he employed with his 1969 film on Idi Amin, relying on his subject to damn himself with his own words. What may have worked with a dictator of questionable sanity is far less successful with an experienced (one might say deceptive) trial attorney.

To be sure, Vergès’ words can be absolutely chilling, as when he minimizes the extent of the mass murders committed by his friend Pol Pot. Unfortunately, Vergès is never directly challenged by Schroeder in any of his assertions. Those unfamiliar with the crimes of the Khmer Rouge or the Butcher of Lyon might find his slick evasions convincing, as a result. Consider how many have fallen for Ahmadinejad’s media campaign (and Vergès even gives that audience a variation on the “Bush-is-worse-than-Hitler” line, which of course, the studio put in the trailer).

Vergès is not just deceptive in interview segments, he is also dull. Granted, the advocate may be slick, sophisticated, and smart to be sure, but he is also the personification of the banality of evil. Advocate is fascinating when exposing the world of terror Vergès faithfully serves, but less so when recording his unquestioned dissembling. (It opens October 12 in New York at the Lincoln Plaza.)