The Missing Picture

In 1975 the government changes in Cambodia and the cities are emptied. Rithy Panh is thirteen at the time. He is driven into the countryside with his family; his father dies refusing to eat, his mother and his brothers and sisters go from hunger and illness. There is no footage of those years. There are the propaganda films the regime shot itself; people smiling in the fields, orderly lines, production figures. There is no record of life in the camps. Panh makes that missing picture out of clay. Small figures are carved, dioramas built, and set beside the archive. Rithy Panh directs; he wrote the text with Christophe Bataille and Randal Douc narrates. It is a Cambodian and French co-production. The film won the top prize of the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film, the first nomination submitted by Cambodia. The clay figures were made one by one by hand and are never moved; the narrative proceeds through the camera travelling among them. The matter it treats is the absence of a record; the film is about a document that does not exist, and it does not fill the gap, it shows it. The narrator speaks in the first person and the text is personal. Panh has worked on the same period for years; in other films he talked to those responsible for the regime. The narrative gives no death tolls and proceeds through one family. Its limit is form; the narrative is still, the pace very slow, and the text heavy. Who it is for: viewers curious about documentary form and narratives of history. Who it is not for: it is still, heavy, and the ending bitter.