The award-winning director of the classic documentary S21: Khmer Rouge Killing Machine returns to fiction filmmaking with this devastating adaptation of a Kenzaburo Oe story. Reset in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, it follows the relationship between a captured African American pilot and his child guards. One boy falls under the spell of the Khmer Rouge and becomes the captor of not only the pilot, but the entire village. “A boy is never a soldier in the beginning,” writes Panh of this heartbreaking, elemental tale, made in Cambodia, yet unfortunately universal. All it may take is a rifle, a red scarf, and a lifetime surrounded by violence.