John Pilger travels through Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot's rule, filming a country still counting its dead. The documentary opens with the secret American bombing campaign, ordered by Nixon and Kissinger, that dropped roughly 100,000 tons of explosives on a neutral country, and traces how that devastation fed the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Pilger walks through Phnom Penh's emptied hospitals and schools, interviews survivors of the forced evacuations and labor camps, and shows the mass graves left by a regime that emptied cities and turned 1975 into what it called Year Zero. Aid workers and doctors describe famine and disease compounding the killing after the Khmer Rouge fell, with international politics still blocking relief. Pilger's own narration is blunt and accusatory, naming the governments he holds responsible alongside Pol Pot. The film became one of the first widely seen accounts of the Cambodian genocide, built on footage most Western audiences had never been shown.