The year is approximately 1977.
Comrade, you are the first person to hear my biography, the man says with a warm laugh.
That was a self-serving fiction with only a semblance of reality.
‘Pol Pot Dancing’Thessaloniki Int’l Documentary Festival
His version was a very modest one anybody could have had in any province, this kind of upbringing.
There is greater significance to the film than simply fact-checking a dictators fabulist narrative.
So, to destroy this dance was really destroying part of the identity of the country.
Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in 1980.Getty Images
Remarkbly, decades later that very boy would become a Communist revolutionary and assume the name Pol Pot.
Samy was not only a sister-in-law to Saloth Sar but effectively his foster mother.
The future Pol Pot attended university in Paris, where he was radicalized.
As he assumed the mantle of a revolutionary leader, he adopted various names and shielded his identity.
Even when he eventually seized power in Cambodia, regular people had no idea what their leader looked like.
This was never written down, Sanchez Lansch explains of the Khmer classical dance.
There was never like a bible, how you do this dance training.
It was really given from one teacher to the next teacher.
So, if you break that oral tradition by killing everybody involved, then its gone.
Sanchez Lansch made the trip to Thessaloniki from Berlin, where he is based.
Its my very first time here, he says.
Its a great experience… From Thessaloniki,Pot Pot Dancingwill screen at festivals in Warsaw and Munich, the director tells Deadline.
The film will premiere in theaters in Germany in the fall.
Thats the place where the biggest Cambodian community in the U.S. is.
