MONOLOGUE is a moving address of Cambodia's violent past and in many ways, a study of the nature of trauma - how it collapses time and space and makes distancing from, and thus forgetting history, an impossible task. Both personal and public in nature, the film documents a small plot of land near the rural Banteay Meanchey province (formerly Battambang), where Rattana's sister and grandmother were discarded and buried alongside five thousand others during the Khmer Rouge regime in 1978. An idyllic portrait of the landscape at first glance, the work is a sobering reminder of both the literal and psychological void left behind after the conflict. Rattana's monologue to the sister he never met, who passed away three years before he was born, reveals his struggle to come to terms with the senseless violence and loss experienced by his family and the country. The emptiness in the landscape suggests a deep trauma that can never be represented wholly and thus, never fully comprehended. Against these tranquil scenes, the atrocities he speaks of seem all the more inhuman and unfathomable, becoming increasingly disquieting to comprehend as the video unfolds.
