Movies based on war and crimes against the human race are important, even if they aren't all that fun to watch. "Funan" is a 2018 film about a communist regime forcibly kidnapping millions of citizens of Cambodia to their camps in 1975. While most major crimes of this nature are well-publicized and documented by now, in books and film, this is the first I've heard of such an event. Honestly, I don't think I or anyone I know would be able to find Cambodia on a map. This lack of awareness is "Funan"'s greatest strength, giving it power beyond simply being "another tragic non-fiction story."While the movie does give enough context to follow the story, it feels necessary to briefly cover this part of history (for example, the word "Funan" is never referenced in the movie to either a person or a place, but online research explains it was the old name of what we now know as Cambodia). I apologize for my lack of knowledge on the subject, only briefly summarizing what Wikipedia tells me. Cambodia is a country in between Vietnam and Thailand. Americans participated in the "Vietnam War" to help South Vietnam fight against communist factions in the North of the country. That war ended in 1975. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, the "Khmer Rouge" regime (followers of the local communist party) overthrew the local government in Cambodia, forcibly evacuating its citizens to live in self-sustaining communes, to uphold the values of communism. This event would go on until 1979 (at which point the Vietnam army was eventually able to come to the rescue), and as many of 3 million people are believed to have died in these camps. By comparison, high estimates of people who died in the Holocaust of WWII are around 10 million, although total estimates are difficult to find.The movie opens in the capital city of Cambodia, where quickly citizens are being told to evacuate for their own safety. As millions of people march for several days, they slowly begin to realize they were misled; they continue to walk at gunpoint by their captors. At the center is a family, consisting of a mother, father and a 3-year-old boy, as well as several distant relatives. During this initial march, the boy is separated, and the parents are forced to keep moving forward rather than retrieve their child. They finally arrive at a rural camp of straw huts and acres of rice fields, their belongings taken away, and here they will work and follow communist teachings, forgetting the capitalist ideals that have corrupted their minds. Still without their child, the parents try to trust in an old friend who happens to now be a communist guard, believing him when he says the boy is safe in a separate commune. Months turn to years, and the family only continues to face further separation, starvation and sickness from work and malnutrition, until they finally reunite as the communist camps are slowly liberated. The director, part Cambodian, French and Chinese, based the story partly on his mother's own memories of the event.For this type of story, it's hard not to think about the Holocaust, the massive extermination of Jewish persons by the Nazi party during WWII. Countless movies retell the horrors of that time. Some of them I've studied in high school. No doubt you, too, have seen a couple. Perhaps "Schindler's List," or "Life is Beautiful?" I only mention this because there is a certain established pattern to tell these types of stories. "Funan" suffers a bit from following almost identical story beats. The family is separated early on for an unimaginable amount of time. Others in the camp, friends or family, are slowly killed, but the core characters remain. They ultimately reunite, but on their way to finally escape, one is captured, winking to the others as he sacrifices himself for the others two to reach freedom. All of it is fairly predictable, even without prior knowledge of the event in history. That doesn't make "Funan" unecessary though: being the first major film of these particular events, it's a strong reminder that Jews aren't the only group in the world that have suffered massive crimes against humanity.And despite being set in Asia, the film is entirely spoken in French, with an English song in the end credits... a little distracting, but I suppose if the movie was entirely in English, the same comment could be made for a lack of authenticity. Predictability doesn't make the events any easier to watch. As the people work in the camps under strict rules, only fed a portion of rice each day, we see most of them succumb to starvation, suicide, violence, rape, and death by execution, both of the guilty and innocent. Curiously, almost all of it occurs off-screen, as if in an attempt to keep the film acceptable for children, but what is happening is clear enough that I wouldn't let anyone under 16 watch it. That restraint might have been an attempt to not celebrate the explicitness, but that I noticed at all that almost nothing extreme occurs on screen makes me wonder if a better balance could have been achieved for the subject matter.
There are a couple benefits to "Funan"'s writing that show the amount of respect present in the production. One is that the communist regime is shown to be extremists, brainwashed by their idealology, but in the belief that they are doing the right thing. The movie includes speeches from both hard leaders and softer guards explaining the perfection of their politics, in the fairness of sharing all possessions and work. But it's immediately hypocritical: the guards all eat more food and enjoy more benefits ("they've worked for years already, so they deserve it"). Food and work cause the weakest to die in the first few months, and without permission to leave, it feels akin to slavery. But as strict as they are, they don't intend for these artificial communities to die: there simply isn't enough food yet, and no doctors exist on site. Even a few of these "heartless" guards reveal in time that they, too, understand this is wrong. Capitalism may have its flaws, but this version of communism is described as "hell" multiple times in "Funan" from all sides.There are brief moments where specific communist characters redeem themselves, if only slightly. And the victims aren't infallible: as years pass in captivity, many of them resort to any measures necessary to survive or obtain more food, be it selling out their friends or committing violence themselves. When the communist regime falls at the end, a scene shows many of the victims ganging up on a handful of individuals, accused of being one of the regime, and killing them in revenge for the deaths of their loved ones. It isn't a scene of catharsis, but showing that they became no better than the extremist guards that used violence as power over others, singling out a specific group. It's an honest view of the events, one that most films don't take the time to show, and I appreciated that. Visually, "Funan" is a fine looking film, although there is only so much that can be done to portray bare staw huts and muddy rice fields. Character animation is consistent and realistic, but feels limited and stiff throughout. I quickly came up with the reason: the characters are 3D CGI models. Or rather, they sometimes are, but are usually animated in 2D, with 3D animation as reference. At this time, I've never seen an implementation where it was this difficult to tell the difference, and I suspect many will disagree with me that 3D animation was used at all anywhere in the movie. That's impressive in itself, but it's a shame the the characters (or the facial animations at least) couldn't have been improved a bit. The movie shines best in the details of the environment, and the animation of grass or leaves blowing past crying eyes. Generally, strong directon makes a huge difference in elevating the quality of the movie.Stories based on human-made tragedies are important. But they lose their power when the same incident is told again and again. As horrible as the Holocaust was, or the Hiroshima bombing in WWII, having to see yet another movie about it makes me numb to the horror and the message. The power of telling these stories comes from the first account a person sees, and there are countless atrocities from human history to draw upon. It's for this reason that "Funan" is so powerful, being the first feature film to show the horrors of the Khmer Rouge revolution in 1975 (at least, the first I've personally watched). This makes me aware of how little I know about the world's history, and I wonder how many other events can be found from different countries and ethnic groups. Even today, rascism and violence based on religon and politics continues to exist. Films like this are meant to remind us of the horrors, in the hope that we might not repeat the same mistakes. I'm not hopeful that our race as a whole will ever fully learn. But we have to try. For that matter, I'm not certain director Denis Do had that in mind when making "Funan." This may simply be a method of trying to understand the history, and through reliving and retelling it, accepting that it happened, and letting go, able to move forward to a brighter tomorrow with a little less baggage to carry.