Horrors of real life on PBS show
It’s Halloween, and Dracula is scaring up tourist dollars in Romania. But the truly haunting segment in tonight’s edition of the PBS magazine show “Frontline/World” (9 p.m., KCET) takes place on the other side of the globe, deep in the Cambodian jungle, where the Khmer Rouge still strikes fear.
This “Frontline” spinoff departs from the original’s single-topic format -- a welcome departure from the “news” magazines obsessed with the adulterous murder plot of the week.
Hosting a bittersweet travelogue, expatriate Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu returns to his homeland. He finds vibrancy in hip-hop artists and defiant Gypsy musicians, yet something eerie in the new breed of entrepreneur running Dracula-themed restaurants and training women to be exotic dancers.
In another segment, Amanda Pike finds unrepentant former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, whose reign of terror in the ‘70s left 2 million Cambodians dead. Pol Pot’s deputy, Nuon Chea, says, “Just because you did something wrong doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
The scary thing about the face of evil is its ordinariness.
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