The Missing Picture
-
Sun 9 February 2014 // 20:00
Mon 10 February 2014 // 20:00
(cancelled)
Wed 12 February 2014 // 20:00
Sun 9th, Mon 10th & Wed 12th Feb, 8pm, £5/£4
Dir: Rithy Panh, Cambodia/France, 2013, 92 mins, Cert TBC
Having chronicled the horrors of Pol Pot's regime in documentaries such as S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), director Rithy Panh returns to the subject that haunts his work with this harrowing, deeply felt account of his childhood – endured in various Khmer Rouge labour camps.
After spending his earliest years in a comfortable middle-class household in Phnom Penh, Panh suffered profound hunger and brutality in conditions that saw the rest of his family perish. Looking back on these appalling events from middle age, Panh recreates his experiences with miniature clay figures against stylised backdrops and archive footage (much of it shot by the regime itself).
A searching rumination on the relationship between memory and trauma, The Missing Picture asks – with a sombre urgency and quiet insistence – us to reflect on near-unimaginable suffering.
Rithy Panh: "For many years, I have been looking for a missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled over Cambodia. On its own, of course, an image does not prove mass murder, but it prompts us to think, to meditate, to build history.
"I searched for it in the archives, in old papers, in the villages of my country, in vain. Now I know: this image must be missing.
"I was not in fact really looking for it; would the image not be obscene and insignificant? Thus I have made it up. What I offer you today is neither the image nor the search for a unique image, but the image of a quest: the quest that cinema allows."
The Missing Picture was inspired by The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts his Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields (Clerkenwell Press, 2013), the book Rithy Panh co-wrote with Christophe Bataille. The film won the highest award of Cannes' Un Certain Regard selection, and has also picked up a nomination for the Oscars 2014 best foreign language film category.
Dir: Rithy Panh, Cambodia/France, 2013, 92 mins, Cert TBC
Having chronicled the horrors of Pol Pot's regime in documentaries such as S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), director Rithy Panh returns to the subject that haunts his work with this harrowing, deeply felt account of his childhood – endured in various Khmer Rouge labour camps.
After spending his earliest years in a comfortable middle-class household in Phnom Penh, Panh suffered profound hunger and brutality in conditions that saw the rest of his family perish. Looking back on these appalling events from middle age, Panh recreates his experiences with miniature clay figures against stylised backdrops and archive footage (much of it shot by the regime itself).
A searching rumination on the relationship between memory and trauma, The Missing Picture asks – with a sombre urgency and quiet insistence – us to reflect on near-unimaginable suffering.
Rithy Panh: "For many years, I have been looking for a missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled over Cambodia. On its own, of course, an image does not prove mass murder, but it prompts us to think, to meditate, to build history.
"I searched for it in the archives, in old papers, in the villages of my country, in vain. Now I know: this image must be missing.
"I was not in fact really looking for it; would the image not be obscene and insignificant? Thus I have made it up. What I offer you today is neither the image nor the search for a unique image, but the image of a quest: the quest that cinema allows."
The Missing Picture was inspired by The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts his Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields (Clerkenwell Press, 2013), the book Rithy Panh co-wrote with Christophe Bataille. The film won the highest award of Cannes' Un Certain Regard selection, and has also picked up a nomination for the Oscars 2014 best foreign language film category.