Extreme Orient - A Great Start

L'Image Manquante - The Missing Picture is a remarkable piece of work, focussing on the aftermath of the genocidal rule in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, 1975 - 1979. It won a top prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival.The director and screenwriter Rithy Panh, was born in the capital Phnom Penh in 1964. His family were expelled from the city and held in a labour camp in a remote and rural part of the country. One by one Panh's father, mother, sisters and nephews died from overwork, exhaustion and starvation. He himself escaped to Thailand in 1979 and for a while was held in a refugee camp, before finally arriving in Paris. Initially training as a carpenter, he was given a video camera to try at a party. He was hooked and film became his passion, in particular the documentary, for which he is internationally renowned. 

Panh was able to approach The Missing Picture from an authoritative standpoint, driven by his search for a specific image taken by the Khmer Rouge. Here's his synopsis of the film:

"For many years, I have been looking for the 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 cannot prove mass murder, but it gives us cause for thought, prompts us to meditate, to record History. I searched for it vainly in the archives, in old papers, in the country villages of Cambodia. Today I know: this image must be missing. I was not really looking for it; would it not be obscene and insignificant? So I created it. What I give you today is neither the picture nor the search for a unique image, but the picture of a quest: the quest that cinema allows".

How to film such a story and convey the cruelty and the grotesqueness of everything that happened and still hold on to your audience? The technique Panh adopted was to move the camera while everything else remained static. The only sound was his calm and gentle voice explaining the story with the occasional sound effect of rain. Hundreds of small clay figures were carefully crafted and painted. Each was completely different. Not just boy and girl, man and woman, but each figure showed an emotion through body language, movement and facial expression, in order to capture a particular moment, even death. The Cambodian landscape was also constructed in this way, with forests and fields, labour camps, stone quarry pits, all built to scale.  It's a similar technique use in the Wallace and Gromit films. A labour intensive and time consuming process. We saw images of Panh's team at work as the credits rolled. They were all in one very large space, combining workshop and filming area.  There was a table on top of which was a large box- the set - with the essential filming equipment all around. The hand-made figures were placed, repositioned, removed to create different images, while the camera panned across the scene. From time to time real film from the regime years was interspersed with Panh's story. An extensive re-education programme, particularly for the hierarchical/academic and culturally active communities was put into place, with devastating results. Panh's family were part of this.

We have a Cambodian family within one of our Anglo-French groups. The parents, as they are now, were as very young children caught up in the Khmer Rouge period, escaping into the forests with their families and managing somehow to survive and ultimately to leave the country as refugees before finally arriving in France. The things that happened and the things they saw, left them unable to speak for some years. Now of course things are different for them, but the memories of that experience will never go away.