It was hard to write something about that place. It was hard enough being there with all your human emotions all over the place. It was more difficult to walk around and stare at the nameless portraits of those who died there. The air inside was that of modern-day peacetime, but the presence of the walls that surrounded you told of an unspoken grim and brutal past.
A Somber Visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum | Cambodia
A Canadian tourist was choking up her tears while looking at the photographs of those imprisoned, tortured, and murdered at the Tuol Sleng prison, which ironically was a former high school used by the Khmer Rouge communist regime as "Security Prison 21"—a place which had since become one of the "infamous" places in the history of mankind. A Cambodian tourist guide—who probably recited the history of the place to visitors countless times already—still made it a point to pause and gather her emotion and hold back her tears.
I made that music video in order to share it with others and let it be known that those people, numbering about 20,000 who were imprisoned there during the height of the Khmer Rouge's regime from 1975 to 1979, did not die in vain. A brutal reminder, yes—but something that was necessary for mankind to know, so that it should not be repeated ever again.
I selected U2's "Mothers of the Disappeared" as the soundtrack because the song sang about people who disappeared and were killed in the name of man's brazen obsession with power while driven by misguided morals and politics.
