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''The Missing Picture'' (french: L'Image manquante) is a 2013 Cambodian-French
documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...
directed by
Rithy Panh Rithy Panh ( km, ប៉ាន់ រិទ្ធី; born April 18, 1964) is a Cambodian documentary film director and screenwriter. The French-schooled director's films focus on the aftermath of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambod ...
about the Khmer Rouge. It was screened in the
Un Certain Regard (, meaning 'a certain glance') is a section of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection. It is run at the Debussy, parallel to the competition for the . This section was introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob. The section presents 20 films w ...
section at the
2013 Cannes Film Festival The 66th Cannes Film Festival took place in Cannes, France, from 15 to 26 May 2013. Steven Spielberg was the head of the jury for the main competition. New Zealand film director Jane Campion was the head of the jury for the Cinéfondation and ...
where it won the top prize. It was also screened in the World Cinema section at the 2013
Cinemanila International Film Festival The Cinemanila International Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Manila, Philippines. It was founded by Filipino filmmaker Amable "Tikoy" Aguiluz in 1999. The focus of the festival is on the cinema of the Philippines as well as Southea ...
where it won the Grand Jury Prize. It won the Lumières Award for Best Documentary at the
21st Lumières Awards The 21st Lumières Awards ceremony, presented by the Académie des Lumières, was held on 8 February 2016, at the Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris to honour the best in French films of 2015. Nominees were announced on 4 January 2016. ''My Golden Day ...
and was nominated for the
César Award for Best Documentary Film The César Award for Best Documentary Film (french: César du meilleur film documentaire) is an award presented by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma since 1995. History In 1995, director Marcel Ophüls protested that his film, t ...
at the 41st César Awards.


Overview

This film recreates the atrocities of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge between 1975-1979 through animation, archival footage, and clay diorama figurines handcrafted by sculptor Sarith Mang. Rithy Panh was born in 1964, and at the age of 11 experienced first-hand the upheaval of the Khmer-Rouge takeover. Panh escaped to Thailand and later immigrated to France and enrolled in Cinema Studies and made a career in cinema. His filmography centered around the Khmer-Rouge, focusing on the genocide and the impact on Cambodia. Panh is searching for truth as he explains the process of a loss of cultural identity and how systematically Khmer-Rouge came to power and how the loss of culture impacted Cambodian’s everyday lives. Khmer-Rouge sought to re-educate Cambodians and purify them in revolutionary Socialism. Panh lost many family members, including his parents and his siblings and nephews. Panh claims he made this film to "find his childhood." He states "And my childhood returns. Now it is the boy who seeks me out. I see him. He wants to speak to me. But words are hard to find." In the film he describes seeing his father waste away, wanting to die rather than face the indignities of the brutal regime. The Khmer-Rouge erased identity and culture. Every citizen became a number and no longer had a name. Most Cambodians succumbed to exhaustion and starvation, but approximately 1.5 to 3 million people were killed. Rithy Panh uses the clay figurines to recreate the missing picture from his childhood. The visual novelty of the documentary resides in the first-person narration, which is given with the help of little clay figurines. Miniatures tell the story of hunger, fear, torture, death, dream and hope. They are set in the jungle, in rice fields, in private houses or in schools. This narrative device is brilliant, because it conjures up so many aspects of Panh’s youth. Clay figurines, like lead soldiers, are childhood toys, a childhood that Panh is seeking, "unless my childhood is seeking me." Panh also states "I seek my childhood like a lost picture," Douc says on his behalf in the film's opening voiceover. "Or rather, it seeks me." With "The Missing Picture," Panh sought—and found—his own hard-earned truth." The Missing Picture seeks to provide the visuals for an era lost. Most of the films and photographs from prior to 1975 were destroyed. Nearly every camera after 17 April 1975, the day the Communists took Phnom Penh, was destroyed, as cameras were seen as an instrument of lies and propaganda by the new regime. Those images of dances, birthdays, evidence of human times, were gone forever. "Panh believes deeply in cinema and the restorative, communicative power of moving images. The ultimate insult, then, is to see how the Khmer Rouge’s version of cinema was a total lie, a neutered version of events meant to sell the revolution to communist elites around the world – "those in Paris" as the voiceover angrily puts it – who directly or tacitly supported the Khmer Rouge and accepted at face value its covered-up monstrosity." "At times Panh’s memory sickness is too colored with middle-class naivety: the pre-crisis era in Cambodia was much more complicated, of course, than the blissfully dancehall world he recreates with clay (he acknowledges as much by pointing out how the Khmer Rouge manipulated real class issues to gain power)." Today, Panh actively teaches and mentors Cambodian filmmakers. In 2006 he started the Audiovisual Center Bophana. Audiovisual Center Bophana was opened on 4 December 2006 in Phnom Penh Cambodia. Partnering with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the National Audiovisual Institute, the Thomson Foundation for the Cinematic and Television Heritage, The International Francophonie Organization, The French Ministry of Culture and Communication; The National Center for the Cinema and UNESCO, the Center not only collects images and sounds of the Cambodian memory and makes them available to a wide public, but also trains Cambodians in the audiovisual professions by welcoming foreign film productions and its own artistic projects. The film was nominated for the
Best Foreign Language Film This is a list of categories of awards commonly awarded through organizations that bestow film awards, including those presented by various film, festivals, and people's awards. Best Actor/Best Actress *See Best Actor#Film awards, Best Actress#F ...
at the 86th Academy Awards. Approximately half of the film is news and documentary footage, while the other half uses clay figurines to dramatise what happened in Cambodia when Pol Pot came to power.


Cast

* Randal Douc as the narrator (original French version) * Jean-Baptiste Phou (English version)


Reception

''The Missing Picture'' has an approval rating of 99% on
review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...
website
Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, based on 88 reviews, and an average rating of 8.26/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Thrillingly unorthodox and emotionally searing without being didactic, ''The Missing Picture'' is a uniquely poignant documentary -- and so much more". It also has a score of 87 out of 100 on
Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...
, based on 23 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


See also

*
List of submissions to the 86th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film This is a list of submissions to the 86th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has invited the film industries of various countries to submit their best film for the Academy Award ...
*
List of Cambodian submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film Cambodia is one over one hundred currently existing nations that has submitted films for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, with their first submission announced in 1994 to compete for the 1995 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. ...


References


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Missing Picture 2013 films 2013 documentary films French documentary films Cambodian documentary films Documentary films about the Cambodian genocide 2010s French-language films Films directed by Rithy Panh 2010s French films