The Missing Picture

2013 ‘L'image manquante’ Directed by Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh uses clay figures, archival footage, and his narration to recreate the atrocities Cambodia's Khmer Rouge committed between 1975 and 1979.

Randal Douc

Alternative Title

L'Immagine Mancante

documentary

95 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Dragonknight ★★★★ 2

”There is no truth, there is only cinema.”
This is like a psychotherapy session. The Missing Picture is the prime example of an artistic creation in which the artist’s main intention is to achieve catharsis and mental peace. By telling us about his childhood memories of Khmer Rouge reign back in late 70s – which saw one of the most brutal genocides in the history of mankind when Khmer Rouge forces murdered, worked or starved to death more than 1.7 million Cambodians over a four year period - director Rithy Panh hopes to find a way out of the dark, bitter and horrifying maze of memories and in the end he manages to build an experience which is purifying and…
Review by Adam Cook ★★★★ 8

Rithy Panh’s stunning documentary of childhood remembrance is a unique and captivating work of genuine power. Panh contrasts archival footage with diorama clay-figure reconstructions to explore the atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge’s revolution in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The film’s title refers to the missing culture, lives and artifacts destroyed by the communist dictatorship in the name of social solidarity as Panh attempts to explore his very personal history.
Panh was just 13-years old when the Khmer Rouge took the capital city, Phnom Penh. Removed from their homes, families were stripped of their names, identities and belongings and thrown into Kampuchean labour camps and killed or worked to death for the progress of a new Cambodia. It’s a…
Review by Melissa Tamminga ★★★★½ 2

"How do you revolt when all you've got are black clothes and a spoon?"
How indeed, when everything is stripped from you, is there space for anything but survival - and in the surviving, what is left but grief, guilt, loss? But here, now, Rithy Panh stages his revolt, as the only means to continue living. Here, using crude clay, as if using the very stuff of his being and of the flesh of those he buried, Panh builds images of what he lost - and builds it on his own terms.
Where the Khmer Rouge had seized photos to destroy the threat of the personal and of the individual and created new films to promote political ideology and lying…
Review by Mohammed 🕸 ½ 1

حل للأرق
Review by ‮سُلافة‬ ★★★★ 2

It was very beautiful yet painful to watch..
Review by Alex Engquist ★★★★½

had a great Twitter conversation with Ben Hynes (letterboxd.com/cautiousdisplay), who suggested that Rithy Panh's film is "contrapuntal" to Joshua Oppenheimer's THE ACT OF KILLING. I think that in a basic sense, both Panh and Oppenheimer are attempting to fill in the gap between history and memory - the crucial difference is that Panh rejects and even condemns cinema for its role in allowing the Khmer Rouge to seize and maintain control of his native Cambodia, while Oppenheimer is so taken by his morbid fascination with what the artifice of cinema does to the Indonesian war criminals and the recollections of their crimes in AoK that he can never quite move beyond it to question his own approach.
Panh's film is…
Review by TajLV ★★★

________________________________________________________________
Film #18 of 30 in my March Around The World | 2017 Challenge (Cambodia)
________________________________________________________________
This documentary from writer-director Rithy Panh of Cambodia was nominated for the Academy Award in the category of Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. It also won Panh the Cinema for Peace Award as the Most Valuable Documentary of the Year as well as Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes. Using newsreels and clay figures, it recreates the filmmaker's memories of life under Pol Pot and the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975–1979. Randal Douc narrates the original in French, while Jean-Baptiste Phou voices the English version.
The opening scene is of a clay figure being carved to represent Panh's father. He shows us…
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★

73/100
Exactly the sort of grim memoir that I find oppressive when it's done conventionally; the layer of abstraction imposed by the clay figures makes all the difference. Wish Panh had been a bit more rigorous in his use of the conceit—I detected little rhyme or reason, apart from strict utility, in the way he jumps around between modes, or in e.g. the occasional superimposition of figurines onto archival footage (which is quite effective)—but overall it's an uncannily moving experience, enhanced by beautifully written and performed (in French, by an actor standing in for Panh) voiceover narration. A valuable companion piece to S21.
Review by The Ron ★★★½ 2

Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture could simply be described as the film version of his harrowing memoir, but his choice to use ceramic figures, archive footage, and his own narration make it an interesting and unique experience.
Panh's recollection of the atrocities committed against Cambodians in the 1970's is deeply personal, and the way those people are represented by the ceramic figurines adds a very somber effect to the story. Much like a photograph the figures seem to capture a moment in time. They seem to capture the suffering those people went through. I didn't know much about these atrocities going in so I definitely learned something, and the highly original way Panh tells his story is well worth your time.
Review by Mohammed Almulhim ★★★ 1

الاشكال الطينية فكرة جميلة لكن فقط لجزء من الفلم
لكن الاعتماد عليها بهذا الشكل مع الطرح البطيء والهادىء قتل الاحداث المعروضة
Review by Steven Sheehan ★★★★ 2

There is certainly a comparison to be drawn between Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh's journey back to his childhood in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Both utilise distinct filming methods to depict the darkest underbelly of human existence, one using dramatic re-enactments, the other using clay figurines to re-create memories that burn vividly in the directors mind.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, the Khmer Rouge’s cultural revolution in Cambodia, under the guidance of Pol Pot, stripped a country of its identity. A soul. Its people. Loveling moulded clay models bring to life the re-education and starvation experienced by millions forced out of their homes to work, serve and rebuild the country under a…
Review by Rethaam ★★½

فكرة تعويض الصور الضائعة بالمجسمات المصنوعة يدوياً فكرة ممتاز وجميلة، لكن الإعتماد عليها بشكل كلي ضعف من قوة رسالة الفلم وخلاه ممل جداً.

Recent reviews

Review by hgignac ★★★★

52 of 2021.
Review by Scott McRae ★★★★★

“It all starts with purity and ends with hate.”
A difficult viewing experience but incredibly essential, unspeakable atrocities almost too horrific for film are treated here in miniature, there is no limit to the capacity for cinemas ability to process and depict trauma... this is a work of reckoning, of bearing witness to otherwise that which will forever remain secret, solitary pain.
Review by Tim ★★½

It shouldn't really be a movie? A MoMA installation or a memoir sure, but film is not the right medium.
Review by marcel_ ★★★★

Tragic, haunting documentary. Those clay pops are awesome, if it's appropriate to say so, regarding the subject.
Review by Daniel L. ★★★★

Once you accept the aesthetic conceit — and it took me at least ten minutes, including a couple I spent gritting my teeth through clumsy “superimpositions” — you begin to realize why it’s essential to this story. I’ve tried to comprehend the Khmer Rouge through reading books and traveling in Cambodia, but art like this serves its own purpose in teaching human experience. I’m not sure anything can capture life in a forced labor collective like this film does.
Review by Alessandro Torza ★★½

This documentary portrays a tragic moment in Cambodia’s history by a combination of archival images, recordings and footage, voice-over narration, and clay figures. The concept is interesting, but I am not sure the whole is put together in a way that is more than the sum of the parts. On the contrary, I felt that most of the time the transition from one medium to another would disrupt the experience, rather than enhancing it. But most importantly, the film ends up being an exercise in redundancy, where the same concept is stated both verbally and visually. If the director had put more effort into weaving together a story by relying more forcefully on visual storytelling and less on the (rather tedious) narrator’s voice, the film could have achieved so much more.
Review by Bouillabaisse 3000 ★★★★★

Requiem pour un massacre
Review by David Beliën

Imágenes que mienten e imágenes que gritan la verdad. Imágenes que mantienen eternamente viva una memoria moribunda. Y al final, el cine, como medio para descubrir las imágenes que faltan.
Review by Matt Perez ★★★★★

This film is stunning recreation of that which is impossible to truly recreate. Instead of using actors, Rithy uses clay dolls and projectors to tell the haunting story of his life in Cambodia. Equal parts shocking, horrifying, and morose, it is a thought provoking masterpiece.
Review by sami_shaffer ★★★★½

This movie will captivate you if you let it. I definitely recommend watching this with headphones in a dark room to really get the full experience. The director narrates throughout the film in a soft, matter of fact tone, and that coupled with the claymation make this movie feel sort of slow, but if you’re willing to immerse all your senses into this film it’s very powerful.

My only gripe is the version I watched didn’t have any closed captions.
Review by BillyJeanWilder ★★★★

Powerful.
Review by no2camels ★★★★½

I don’t know how to write about this film.
Growing up in America, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge are glossed in an after thought of the Vietnam War: “2 million dead by execution and starvation.” The stories of the Americans who fled, or who starred in movies about the killing fields I can count on two fingers, but the stories of those who buried those dead. . .
The clay figures may at first seem a ploy—a novel gimmick in the vein of “Maus”—but the use of the clay, the same clay saturated with the blood of millions is a metonym. Each ghostly clay figurine, may literally contain the blood of the dead they represent, and are just as…