‘We should take another look’, the journalist Richard Dudman counseled in the New York Times some 35 years ago, ‘at the man we love to hate.’ Dudman was referring to none other than Pol Pot, the murderous Cambodian despot who oversaw the genocide of his own countrymen, killing roughly two million people during the terror of his rule. Dudman had heard about Pol Pot’s savagery, but he was wary of the ‘conventional wisdom that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are irrational fanatics’. What the Khmer Rouge really had, he suggested, was a narrative problem: they had made ‘almost no effort to tell their story’.

Dudman was not a zealot, nor a crank, or a fool: on the contrary, he was a George Polk Award-winning journalist, a storied reporter who spent 40 days in Viet Cong captivity, and who bravely published early instalments of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. More pertinently, he carried the rare authority of having personally witnessed Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge as one of the first western journalists permitted inside the regime in 1978.

It would be uncharitable to quote further from Dudman’s op-ed; the text has curdled worse than milk. Dudman came to realise this, but only late in life, shortly before his death in 2017. He admitted, finally, that ‘genocide’ had occurred, and, in a late essay, wondered aloud whether he might have been fooled by Nazi propaganda, too: ‘Would I first have tried to report [Hitler’s] side of the story?’ The sad truth, admitted the reporter, ‘is that I don’t know’.

How, exactly, does a serious journalist get things so terribly wrong? Why do smart, rigorous people so often wear such powerful blinkers, believing only the stories they wish were so, ignoring the reality before their eyes? These are questions central to Meeting with Pol Pot, the Cambodian director Rithy Panh’s provocative new film, which draws upon the story of Dudman’s visit to Cambodia alongside the Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell and the American journalist Elizabeth Becker. Becker later chronicled their trip in When the War Was Over, her masterful account of Cambodia after the twin horrors of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge. Over the past three decades, Becker and Panh – himself a refugee of the Khmer Rouge – have collaborated on numerous films: Meeting with Pol Pot is their first depiction of those fateful two weeks.

Panh transposes Becker, Dudman, and Caldwell into the journalist Lise Delbo, the photographer Paul Thomas, and the rather hapless academic Alain Cariou. Upon landing in Cambodia, the trio are startled by the emptiness of the country, and frustrated by the opaqueness of their handlers. Lise and Paul chafe at the regime’s strict itinerary, which allows only carefully plotted visits to workers’ cooperatives. Each is a Potemkin village, in which every man is well-fed, and every rice harvest sets records. Paul lands in trouble when he wanders off in search of less choreographed scenes; Lise struggles to interview peasants rather than party leaders.

Their pluckiness reflects Becker’s real-life courage: the reporter twice snuck away from her guides on that December trip, desperate to glimpse life beyond the propaganda tour. She was chastised for her impudence (in the film, Paul fares far worse). Alain, the stand-in for Caldwell, is the group’s fiercest defender of the Khmer Rouge, and he criticises his peers for their defiance. ‘We’re so lucky to visit this country at a key moment of its history,’ he tells Paul. ‘You must go by the rules.’ He makes a pragmatic point – deported reporters can’t observe much – but here the moral trade-offs of access journalism carry particularly high stakes.

The late 1970s were, in Alain’s defence, key moments in Cambodia’s history, and it was onerously difficult – in Dudman’s defence – to make any sense of what was happening inside the hermetic regime. The miasma of the Nixon-Kissinger Indochina policy had just begun to lift, while at the same time chilling reports from Khmer Rouge refugees trickled in. It was clear that America’s clandestine bombing and invasion had devastated the country, destroying its political and economic systems and creating what scholar Khatharya Um has called the ‘golden opportunity’ for revolutionary terror. Few in the West were eager to support the brazenly venal and incompetent Nixon-aligned Lon Nol regime, and, for many, the opposing Khmer Rouge (led by the Paris-educated ‘red Khmers’ of the maquis) seemed the enemy of one’s enemy. Details from the newly named Democratic Kampuchea were woefully incomplete, and pundits of all persuasions seized new data to justify old mistakes. Right-wing interventionists wanted fresh bombs for a new communist menace; left-wing anti-imperialists ignored reports of Khmer Rouge savagery for fear, in the words of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, of ‘undermin[ing] the credibility of those who opposed the war’. All data was suspect; every anecdote served an agenda. ‘Journalists who accepted the refugee accounts’, lamented William Shawcross, ‘were accused of being dupes of the CIA.’ It was an untenable moment for journalism, and those who reported without bias – Becker among them – won few plaudits.

Yet the Khmer Rouge were all that and more: few regimes in history have matched the brutality of their rule, which did away with all forms of currency, community, even family, replacing these bourgeois structures with loyalty to an obscure leadership called Angka. The Angka favored indiscriminate murder to piecemeal re-education: ‘Better an absence of men than imperfect men,’ Pol Pot tells Alain in the film, paraphrasing a line from François Ponchaud’s Cambodia: Year Zero.

As Meeting with Pol Pot progresses, the lie grows louder. Paul finds dirt and rice hulls comprise much of the storied harvest; Lise sees the terror in a peasant’s eyes as he stumbles through an interview. Yet Alain struggles to admit reality: ‘Deep down’, he assures Pol Pot, ‘I’m like you.’ For him the leader is still an old classmate from the Sorbonne; he is loathe to criticise a regime with so much potential. Real-life defenders of the Khmer Rouge were similarly slow to shift their stances. Their task was not easy: unlearning one’s beliefs is a painful experience, a rude awakening that requires openness and humility. For the Swedish journalist Gunnar Bergström, who also visited Democratic Kampuchea in 1978, learning the truth was ‘like falling off the branch of a tree’. That tumble may bruise, but it also marks the surest distinction between journalism and advocacy: the ability to report what one sees, not what one wishes to see.

For Panh, Meeting with Pol Pot is a movie about ‘truth’, ‘journalism’, and ‘manipulation’. These are broad, ambitious themes, but his film largely makes the mark. Its greatest fault is an over-reliance on clay figurines, a budget-conscious stylisation that does well to illustrate the unspeakable, but which distracts when used as a plot device. The film’s inscrutable ending will also confound viewers, but here the story enjoys – to borrow from Kissinger – ‘the added virtue of being true’. It is reality itself which was impossible to parse.

In a way, that murky ending proves fitting: Democratic Kampuchea was an unintelligible terror, irrationally led by men who defied reason. It was a test of the highest order for journalists to wring meaning from its madness, to resist the temptations of Manichaean thought, and to revise their convictions as new information arrived. Those who did, deserve commendation: their courage might offer a model for our contentious present. Becker, when the time came to depart, did not pack the gifts of her propaganda tour: ‘I purposely left behind the axe given me at a cooperative the day before. I did not want an axe from Democratic Kampuchea.’