The Killing Fields is an Oscar winning movie about the American war in Cambodia and it's disastrous effects on the Khmer people.
It is a true story and tells how New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg (played by Sam Waterston) and his Cambodian sidekick Dith Pran (played by Haing Ngor) worked together covering the illegal war until the US backed government of Lon Nol were forced to withdraw by the steadily advancing Khmer Rouge leaving the country and its people to a dangerously uncertain fate. The movie addresses many issues about the nature of war at a distance and its tragic consequences. It explores the nature of personal choice, individual responsibility in times of moral collapse, and the true nature of friendship and trust. The most powerful sequences belong to Dith Pran's story as he endures and finally escapes from, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. This is a timeless tale that is also of 'its time'. It sings a lament for humankind that we have clearly not heard as we look at what is now happening in Iraq and elsewhere.