
Among the three guests present, one is Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), a socialist scholar with ties to Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, from their student activist days in Paris. Intrigued by the concept of the recently renamed “Democratic Kampuchea”, Cariou seeks to debunk what he perceives as biased, anti-communist news in Western media, which has been reporting on refugee accounts about prisons, torture, mass killings, famine, and sickness. (It is estimated that the Cambodian genocide would eventually take around 2 million lives.) He listens attentively as his companions praise their efforts to mold “a new person”, and he readily accepts their optimistic portrayals of life under Pol Pot’s version of communism, branded as Year Zero: a society where everyone appears content, having relinquished material possessions, personal freedom, individuality, education, and even eyeglasses.