François Ponchaud, Cambodia 2019

François Ponchaud came to Cambodia as a young French missionary in 1965. After an initial period of peace, he witnessed the bombing of the country ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger from 1969. He was there in 1975 when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge and had to leave the country. After his expulsion and years of research into what happened on the Cambodian-Thai border, where he collected witness accounts in refugee camps, Ponchaud published Cambodge année zéro (Cambodia: Year Zero) in 1977, which was one of the first books to describe the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.

In the 1980s Ponchaud founded the Espace Cambodge in Paris, an institution that was to help Cambodians settle in France. Since 1993 he has been living in Cambodia again, where he and his Cambodian colleagues have translated the Bible into the Khmer language. Today, he campaigns for the rights of the Cambodian rural population affected by land theft as a result of the government transferring large areas of land to foreign investors. He lives alternately in Phnom Penh and a small rural parish in Kampong Cham province.

Producer/Assistant: Christopher Jarvis
Genre: Reportage
Camera (digital): Nikon Z6
Nikkor-Z zoom lens 24-70mm/2.8
Nikkor-Z zoom lens 14-30mm/4