The Missing Picture
(L'Image manquante)

In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, Rithy Panh and his family were deported by the Khmer Rouge’s totalitarian and genocidal regime and underwent forced labour and indoctrination. Opposite archive images originating from the executioners themselves, the filmmaker fashions simple and expressive clay figurines to represent this camp life, whose very fragility acts as a shield against the deceptive readings of propaganda films. Cinema becomes the place to invent memory, a place where it is possible, in the same gesture, to point out a documentary gap – the missing image – and to hunt for other images, that unambiguously show the traces of their fabrication and the seal of intimacy and of thought. FM