Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge fell from power in 1979, but its continuing guerrilla war left the country in chaos until peace was finally declared in 1992. Rithy Panh’s narrative atmospherically captures that moment, when a people who had “known nothing but war, the camps, famines, massacres” began to stagger toward normalcy. A demobilized soldier heads to Phnom Penh and falls for a dance-hall girl, but despair, poverty, and the lure of fast money may prove their doom. Part urban noir and part doomed melodrama, One Evening offers a window (streaked with tears, neon, and dust) into a country—and a people—reemerging after decades of trauma. “The world forgot us for much too long.”