"Les Vivantes"
On April 17, 1975, after four years of civil war, Pol Pot's troops enter Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. In a few hours, the city is completely cleared of its inhabitants. The city dwellers, as well as the rural inhabitants who had not yet been acquired by the Khmer Rouge, were deported to the most hostile areas of the country. Forced labor, executions without trial, famine, mass murders...Few voices will be heard in this impending catastrophe in which more than a third of the population will be wiped out and in which living simply means not dying. This book traces the fate of one of them. That of a woman caught in the turmoil of events that escape her and hold her captive; she will draw from the deepest wells of her intimacy the weapons of a merciless struggle against the wounds of her flesh.
To live with the mad hope of not letting her win. To live not to see her own body disappear. To live again, just for the next moment. Richard Rechtman is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and anthropologist, director of studies at EHESS.
Since 1990, he has established and directed the specialized psychiatric consultations for Cambodian refugees at the Centre Philippe-Paumelle in Paris. He is a member of the Cambodian Center for Audiovisual Resources, the Bophana Center, founded by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. In collaboration with Didier Fassin, he has published L'Empire du traumatisme chez Flammarion (2007).