“The Missing Picture” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. It does not yet have an American release.
For Rithy Panh, the memories that haunt his mind belong only to him, not to history. The images he sees exists nowhere else, and in order to be rid of them, he needs to create them, throw them to the wall and display them for the world.
In his documentary “The Missing Picture” it is noble that he’s done so. Panh’s film is harrowing and artistic, but the medium in which he has chosen to convey his message is impersonal and cold. “The Missing Picture,” the winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, has grand ambitions, but it is a dreary slog without an emotional core to grasp.
Panh lived through the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia in which hundreds were killed in a genocide because of the Communist government’s social ideas. They operated on the ideology that a shared agricultural system complete of rice pickers would eliminate class, corruption and poverty in their utopian society. The reality was famine, drought, a lack of medicine or resources and deaths throughout the region.
But the images that exist from this period are largely propaganda films. The images do not match up with the history, and Panh’s memories are merely figments. What he’s done with his film then is acknowledge that what he remembers is unique, that there is no truth, “there is only cinema,” he says. Continue reading “CIFF Review: The Missing Picture”