”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…

Nineteenth watch of March around the World: Cambodia. The Missing Picture is a documentary feature on the Cambodian ‘Khmer Rouge’ committed between 1975 and 1979, told at the hand of director Rithy Panh’s narration and a set of large hand-made clay figures used to reenact historical events. The film has been met with unanimous critical acclaim and although its unique approach to film-making justifies this praise, it is also what keeps me from caring about it. This because the documentary, in my opinion, fails cinematically by conveying its story through almost solely static elements, repeatedly provoking the following question to my mind: why am I not reading about this in a journal article? Whereas some describe the displayed hybrid of…

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…

"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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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…

One cannot easily or comprehensively understand the depths of man's inhumanity to man outside those depths. Even the clichéd ways we describe these events and actions, these "inhumanities", are facile attempts at summing up the unthinkable. We describe the unthinkable with harsh language, with anger. We watch flickering images of the unthinkable and decry them as atrocities, as tragedies to mourn and then forget. But we do not know. Nor do these victims know. One cannot easily or comprehensively understand what ideology, what mindset causes another to force people away from their homes, into the fields, beneath the dirt. Even at its hand, one cannot fully grasp the unthinkable.

Rithy Panh, who has been making films dealing with his first…

A film built around the fundamental downfall of film, the simulation of perspective inevitably broken by the borders of the frame. There are certainly images taken during the Cambodian genocide, but few of them carry the devastating weight of the events that transpired nor the devastating banality of it, millions neglected, abandoned, and left to starve. Panh, unable to remedy his grief through archival footage, turns to an abstraction of his experience: crude clay figures replicating the innocence of childhood, created from the earth his people were buried in. But, even after the rejection of indexicality, no catharsis is found, moving only slightly closer to the ever-distant past. The figures are buried and returned to the earth, to the endlessly…