Bokor

The cambodian khmer rouge regime wanted to erase any form of family and pre-existing social structure, any kind of culture and tradition.
Their aim was to build a completely new country, destroying personal and collective memory. Their utopic nightmare killed nearly four million people and left a deep wound in cambodian society, still visible after more than thirty years. Spirituality and religion were major targets of the dictatorship for being powerful links with traditional culture. The golden temple represents how contemporary totalitarian governments use religion and media as tools to control people by controlling their idols, instead of destroying them.
Bokor was a luxury holiday resort for the elite who ruled the country in the colonial period, then it became a military base during the civil war. Today its ruins are wide-open windows on the memory of dictatorship. Bokor becomes a paradigmatic representation of the most urgent need of totalitarianism: the need to erase (or reinvent) the past to get total control over the people.