Conclusion
“Although I understand what you mean when you use the term ‘re-enactment,’ for me it’s not really that at all. It’s not the right word for that. Maybe there isn’t a word for it,” Rithy Panh once said to film director Joshua Oppenheimer (2012, p.
244). Panh’s caution stems from the fear that the theatrical dimension sometimes associated with reenactment might interfere with or even undermine his attempt to produce complex forms of witnessing. The analysis of We Want [u] to Know shows how difficult it is to assign a single function to reenactment in post-genocide Cambodia. As a practice, at times contentious, it has long been part of memorialization processes, and as such, it has been shaped and reshaped throughout the transition out of the Cold War and toward the transitional justice period. The chapter has tried to illustrate how, in the context of Cambodian genocide film, reenactment helps perform multiple and changing articulations between past and present, archive and repertoire, affect and knowledge, memory and history, individual and collective, old and young generations, locals and outsiders—possibly going beyond the “juridical registers” Schlund-Vials (2016) considers the main feature of the genre and rather becoming a form of representation that not only documents processes of reconstruction but also plays an active part in them. In the absence of a truth and reconciliation commission in Cambodia (the option was discarded in favor of the hybrid tribunal), works such as We Want [u] to Know have provided additional and decentralized platforms of expression for the population and possibly an alternative way of speaking about the Democratic Kampuchea period. As such, Pugliese’s movie is now part of the ECCC’s legacy. Alongside court documents and other institutional material, academic papers, reports, books by journalists, memoirs, newspaper articles, videos, blogs, and social media postings, it will help to draw a multilayered picture of the complexities of transitional justice in Cambodia.
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