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Well, as movies go, it needs to be commended for its aim to be very accurate in its portrayal of certain locations, events and people. Even though the movie was not filmed in Cambodia as the country was still fairly closed off to the west at this time, the level of detail in some scenes is astonishing. For instance, the visa that Sydney Schanberg (played by Sam Waterson) presents at the beginning of the film is, down to the font and style, perfect. Compare footage of the fall of Phnom Penh to the way it is depicted in the film, and you are made very aware that the filmmakers were striving for a very high level of visual accuracy. I've been working on something related to this recently so excuse some of the depth I go into.

Basically all the ‘big stuff’ in the movie did happen if that is your question, it’s like if someone asked whether the movie about the Titanic was accurate – sure to a large extent it is, the ship really hit an iceberg, it did break into two parts and it sunk and a lot of people died. Similarly, with a movie about the Khmer Rouge, all of the events depicted in the film are more or less true. However, when asking how accurate the movie is, or if it portrays things as if they happened when in fact, they didn’t, we can point a few things out where the script or the film makers decided they would depart from the source material.

The screenplay was based off Sydney Schanberg’s account for the New York Times called ‘The Death and Life of Dith Pran’. It was turned into a book and is relatively short, but it contains the big plot points that we see in the movie. Schanberg’s work in Cambodia from 1972, his relationship with his assistant Dith Pran, the last few years of the Cambodian Civil War and the eventual fall of Phnom Penh, the events causing Pran to be forced into the countryside at the French Embassy and some details of what happened between the two colleagues being reunited in 1979. If we ask whether those plot points are in the movie? Then yes, they are.

But when you zoom in on some of these ‘plot points’ a little closer, there are changes.

Firstly, the day that the Khmer Rouge finally entered Phnom Penh, April 17th 1975, the sequence of events on film and the sequence of events as explained in the book, or in other books (like Jon Swain’s River of Time) or the retelling of this day by Al Rockoff and Sydney Schanberg at the ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunals) differ somewhat. For instance, they did go to the hospital (Preah Keth Mealea) and it was certainly as bloody and gruesome as depicted – however there were no doctors there that day, none had turned up. There were doctors (western ones like in the movie) still working at some other locations, like at the makeshift hospital that the Red Cross had set up at the hotel the journalists were staying at (Le Phnom). This was between 12:00-1:00pm, and after they left the hospital they were abducted in fairly similar circumstances as shown, however the ride they took was somewhere between 10-20 minutes and their captors took them to the northern part of the city, on the banks of the Mekong river and near the ruins of the Japanese bridge. In the commentary track for the film, the director claims that they may have been detained there for up to 11 hours. This is way off, perhaps he was misremembering, because he would have met all of the people that actually experienced it, but anyway, their captivity near the bridge was at most 3 hours long. Pran pleaded with a senior cadre (as shown in the film) for about an hour, before he was sent off on the back of a motorcycle with another KR cadre, they went to the Ministry of Information, came back 30 minutes later and Pran had secured their release from a higher positioned cadre. To be fair the film does show a motorbike leaving, just not with Pran on it.

In the movie, the journalists are also witness to some killings during their time waiting. This did not occur in reality. Although they certainly were fearing for their lives, this scene in the film implies they were there for a very long time and saw murders and dead bodies, which they did not. They were told to leave and head to the Ministry of Information at about 3:30pm, where they see many other Lon Nol government officials congregating (a radio message was calling for them to report there – it was a trap they were all killed soon after). The movie does not show the journalists going there, or them talking to some of these officials. They then head to their hotel, pick up some things, and walk to the French Embassy (all of these locations are fairly close together if you look on a map) they got there at about 5:30pm. Which is where the film shows them going straight after their period of being detained.

The events at the embassy are a blend of fiction and reality, again the film is admirable in its attempt to show what happened, but here we see some proper examples of ‘lets insert a dramatic scene here’. I’ll go through the events which occurred over the first couple of days after the fall of Phnom Penh and just briefly say where the film departs.

April 18th (the morning after) around 7:30am, French officials make it clear that everyone in the embassy needs to get their passports ready so they can catalogue who is in the compound. Sarun and Hea (two of Schanberg’s assistants/drivers) decide to leave that afternoon around 2pm. Their departure is not shown in the movie. Nor is it really clear how much time is passing either, but that is neither here nor there. The journalists think they can get Pran to stay though and they do try and use one of Swain’s extra passports to produce a forgery. Unlike the film however, they already have a photo, they scrape off Swain’s and just glue Pran’s on. No drama, no need to get photography chemicals and a darkroom, no angry Jon Malkovich (by the way the real Al Rockoff is not impressed by this stuff in the movie!). They hand in the passport the next day, the 19th of April.

On the 20th of April, the French hand back the passport saying that it wouldn’t work. They were concerned that if they could see that it was a forgery, naturally the KR would as well, and that might jeopardise the already uneasy relationship they had with the country’s new rulers. The KR had relegated the embassy from any semblance of ‘sovereignty’ and to a ‘regroupment zone’ for the foreigners. The embassy staff wanted at all costs to avoid the KR just storming in and taking whoever they please, with possible violence resulting.

That same day, at around 10:15am Pran and about 20 other Cambodians leave the embassy. In the movie, it is made out that Pran is one of the last to go, it also implies that this happens after it is announced that ‘the trucks that have been arriving are going to take you to Thailand’… which wouldn’t happen until the 30th of April (ten days later). The film also shows Sirik Matak leaving the embassy, which actually happened the day after Pran had left. Pran was clever, he knew that the longer he stayed in the embassy he would be in more trouble due to this very conspicuous association with the foreigners there. He left and joined the remaining people still in exodus from the capital, heading northwest toward Siem Reap (his hometown).

Naturally, as this is kind of the movie’s emotional peak, the screenplay muddles the events up a bit so there is a gradual increase in tension, then a hope that all is well, then all hope is lost. I didn’t see this mentioned in any of the accounts either but I would be willing to go out on a limb and say that I doubt it would have been coincidentally raining in this tearful scene either, April is the hottest month of the year and in the dry season so… yeah I dunno. It’s a movie.

What the movie doesn’t show is the adept way that Pran does navigate himself toward Siem Reap, he ditches his ‘western’ clothes for some more rustic wear – suitable for the taxi driver persona he decides to adopt. I wish it had because that would have been really interesting, and the changes it does make (like Dith Pran seemingly being like the last Cambodian to leave the embassy) always confused me when I was younger as to how he would have escaped the attention of the KR at all.

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