(PCM) The gripping documentary by Rithy Panh, The Missing Picture, uses archival footage, clay figures, and narration to take audiences through the terrible crimes committed by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
Based on the quest for a missing picture, director Rithy Panh recreates the terrible barbarities done against the people of Cambodia during the incredibly turbulent and violent rule of Khmer Rouge, a four year period in the history of Cambodia marked by starvation, disease, forced labor, and political executions. Roughly 2 million lives were lost during the reign of Khmer Rouge.
Narrator Randal Douc summarizes the aim of the documentary in the film’s trailer:
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.
Having been released overseas already, The Missing Picture has garnered praise and positive reviews; the film has a fresh rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and is the first Cambodian film to be nominated for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film).
The Missing Picture has a run time of 1 hour and 32 minutes and is unrated by the MPAA.
Watch the documentary’s trailer below, check out the official website here, and catch The Missing Picture when it opens in U.S. theaters on a limited run on March 19th.
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