Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh (born April 18, 1964 in Phnom Penh) is a Cambodian documentary film director and screenwriter.

Trained in France, Rithy's films focus on the aftermath of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. His works are from an authoritative viewpoint, because his family were expelled from Phnom Penh in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge. One after another, his father, mother, sisters and nephews died of starvation or exhaustion, as they were held in a remote labor camp in rural Cambodia.

Rithy escaped to Thailand in 1979, where he lived for a time in a refugee camp at Mairut. Eventually, he made his way to Paris, France. He graduated from the French National Cinema School and set about making films, returning to Cambodia in 1990, while still using Paris as a home base.

His first documentary feature film, Site 2, was awarded "Grand Prix du Documentaire" at the Festival of Amiens.

His 1994 film, Rice People, is told in a docudrama style, about a rural family struggling with life in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It was in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

The 2000 documentary, The Land of Wandering Souls, also told of a family's struggle, as well as showing a Cambodia entering the modern age, chronicling the hardships of workers digging a cross-country trench for Cambodia's first fiber-optic cable.

His 2003 documentary, about the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng prison, reunited former prisoners, including the artist Vann Nath, and their former captors, for a chilling, confrontational review of Cambodia's violent history.

More post-Khmer Rouge events are documented in the 2005 drama, The Burnt Theater, which focuses on theater troupe that inhabitats the burned-out remains of Phnom Pehn's Suramet Theatre, which caught fire in 1994 but has never been rebuilt.

Rithy has many other projects planned, the chief of which is developing a film school in Phnom Penh.

Filmography

• Site 2 (1989)
• "Cinéma de notre temps: Souleymane Cissé" (French television) (1990)
• Cambodia: Between War and Peace (1991])
• Rice People (Neak Sre) (1994)
• Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (1996)
• One Evening After the War (1998)
• The Land of the Wandering Souls (2000)
• "Que la barque se brise, que la jonque s'entrouvre" ("Let the boat break its back, Let the junk break open") (French television) (2001)
• S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003)
• The People of Angkor (2003)
• The Burnt Theater (2005)

References

• Shankar, Lekha J. (February 3, 2006). "Rewinding Memory", ThaiDay. Retrieved February 4, 2006.

External links

• Rithy Panh at IMDb
• Rithy Panh Film Festival
• Cannes Film Festival