Popular reviews

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  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…

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  Review by Alex Engquist ★★★★½ 1

  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…

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  Review by Melissa Tamminga ★★★★½ 1

  "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…

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  Review by PopcornIdeology ★★

  Maybe I wasn’t in the proper mindset but this did not interest me in the slightest. I’ve read some reviews from others on here comparing it to The Act of Killing or discussing its merits as an art piece that considers the relation between film, memory, culpability, and form, and to those people I say: I’m glad you got something from this.

  CLAY OVERBOARD 4

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  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.

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  Review by ‮سُلافة 🌊‬ ★★★★ 2

  It was very beautiful yet painful to watch..

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  Review by Mohammed 🕸 ½ 1

  حل للأرق

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  Review by Movie Good or Movie Bad? ★★★★

  The combination of the voiceover, the claymation, and the use of archival propagandist footage create a fairly disturbing memoir that is disorienting in how the director tries to make sense of a past he can’t fully grasp and that was devastating. So few pictures and videos appear from that time, due to the actions of the Khmer Rouge that the use of claymation almost feels like a bringing to life of the thoughts the director had as a child. It’s a film that deeply affected me and I am glad it got the Foriegn Language Film nomination at the Oscars the year it was released.

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  Review by Ian Floodgate ★★★½

  Filmmaker Rithy Panh is known for his films centred around the 1970s Cambodian Genocide and the effects of this horrific period in history on his country. The Missing Picture sees Panh recreate the atrocities that took place under the regime of the Khmer Rouge in an innovative and noteworthy way.

  Panh depicts his story partly through the use of archive footage and partly using clay figurines, which the audience sees him carefully craft in the opening moments. These clay sculptures are the people of Cambodia, colourfully dressed with smiles carved on their faces, content with the lives they have. Then, the archive footage presents the audience with the horrors that unfold. Trees are lit in flames, and people are seen…

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  Review by TajLV ★★★

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  Film #18 of 30 in my March Around The World | 2017 Challenge (Cambodia)
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  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…

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  Review by Zachary ★★★★ 1

  The Missing Picture begins with the topography of a thumb. Dried by paint and clay and hours of work, it's the digit of an artist painstakingly reconstructing his home from memory. As the film progresses we glean the cost of these reconstructions, as well as their value. From 1975 when the Khmer Rouge captured the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, their regime oversaw the genocide of nearly 2 million people, including the director's mother, father and siblings.

  Naturally, little photographed evidence exists of this time, or the transition from the Cambodian Civil War to the end of the Democratic Kampuchea in the early 80s. Instead Panh splices what little footage exists with a recreation of his own. The animation style serves…

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  Review by VonBergundy ★★★ 1

  Quest for the Green Map - Cambodia

  A hauntingly powerful and personal documentary/memoir with a unique creative approach. It's pretty meta about cinema and memory as well, which keeps it from being just a straightforward retelling of a historical tragedy. It still doesn't stop it from getting pretty tedious by the end. It never dips in quality, and there aren't any parts which are bad on their own; it just does not need to be nearly 100 minutes. While a cool idea, the inanimate clay figures just don't provide a ton of excitement after a while. It's such a personal film, so it feels unfair for me to say the director should have removed parts of his personal story for my entertainment, but as a documentary it just gets a little boring.