Rithy Panh

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Rithy Panh (2014)

Rithy Panh (born April 18, 1964 in Phnom Penh ) is a Cambodian documentary filmmaker.

Life

Rithy's films deal with the aftermath of the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. His works always take a binding position, as his family was expelled from Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and his parents and close relatives died of starvation and exhaustion in a labor camp in the countryside.

In 1979 he fled to Thailand , where he was able to find accommodation in a refugee camp near Mairut . Eventually he managed to travel to France and settle in Paris . In 1985 he was admitted to the French film school Ecole Nationale Supérieure des métiers de l'image et du son , graduated from there and returned to Cambodia in 1990 , but kept Paris as his residence.

For a long time Rithy Panh suppressed his past and did not want to talk about it. In his view, it is natural for people to want to forget and repress bad experiences, but on the other hand a genocide like the one that happened in Cambodia is profoundly unnatural and impossible to get rid of. By his own admission, at some point in his life he came to the realization that one had to make peace with the past in order to face the future, and so he decided to become a filmmaker. Essentially, his films tell something about individuals and how they were confronted with historical events in the country.

Important works

His first documentary, Site 2 , won the Grand Prix du Documentaire at the Amiens Film Festival .

In 1994 he directed the docudrama Rice People about a farming family struggling to survive in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne from 1996 describes the fate of a young couple, Ly Sitha and Bophana, after the Khmer Rouge came to power: they are arrested, tortured and finally murdered.

In The Land of Wandering Souls from the year 2000 it's back to the struggle for survival of a family. In addition, it shows Cambodia's way into the modern age: with great difficulty, workers dig a trench across the country for the first Cambodian fiber optic cable.

In 2003 he made a documentary about the Tuol Sleng Torture Prison , where he confronted former prisoners, including the painter Vann Nath and Chum Mey , and their tormentors for an examination of Cambodia's recent history.

Furthermore, in the documentary drama The Burnt Theater, produced in 2005 , he tells about a theater group that occupies the burned-out remains of the Suramet Theater in Phnom Penh, which fell victim to a fire in 1994 but was never rebuilt.

His 2006 turned film Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise awarded in the category "Creative Documentary" at the International Festival of Audiovisual Programs in 2007 the first prize. It deals with the fate of prostitutes in Phnom Penh who are exposed to a diabolical environment made up of the grace of their customers, the pimps and the police, as well as the AIDS and drug problems.

In 2013, his documentary The Missing Image ( L'Image manquante ) was awarded the main prize of the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival .

In 2020 Panh received an invitation to compete at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival for his documentary Irradiés .

Bophana Documentation Center and Film School

Rithy Panh is planning many more projects. The most important is the establishment and development of the Bophana Center for Audiovisual Resources ( BARC ) in the Cambodian capital. In addition to the filmmaker Ieu Pannakar , who is responsible for the film department in the Cambodian Ministry of Culture, he is one of its founding committee. The BARC has set itself the task of electronically archiving historical image, film and sound documents about and from Cambodia, which are to be preserved in this way and made available to a broad public. Six films by the Lumière brothers from 1899 , which were shot in Phnom Penh and Angkor , were archived there. In addition, the intention is to train Cambodian filmmakers there in the future, for which special courses will be set up, the degrees of which should be internationally recognized.

Filmography

  • 1989: The Land of Others (Site 2)
  • 1990: Cinéma de notre temps: Souleymane Cissé
  • 1991: Cambodia, entre guerre et paix
  • 1994: The rice field (Neak Sre)
  • 1996: Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne
  • 1998: A love after the war (Un soir après la guerre)
  • 2000: La terre des âmes errantes
  • 2001: In the far east of Paris (Que la barque se brise, que la jonque s'entrouvre)
  • 2003: S-21: The Khmer Rouge's death machine (S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge)
  • 2004: Les gens d'Angkor
  • 2005: Les artistes du Théâtre Brûlé
  • 2007: Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise
  • 2008: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
  • 2011: Duch, le maître des forges de l'enfer
  • 2011: The catch (Gibier d'élevage)
  • 2013: The missing image (L'Image manquante)
  • 2015: exile
  • 2017: The Long Road of Hope (First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers)
  • 2020: Irradiés

Fonts

  • Rithy Panh, Christine Chaumeau: La machine khmère rouge. Monti Santésok S-21 , Paris: Flammarion, 2003.
  • Rithy Panh, Louise Lorentz: Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise , Paris: Grasset, 2007.
  • Rithy Panh, Christophe Bataille: L'Élimination , Grasset, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-246772811 .
    • German extinction. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge reports , From the French by Hainer Kober. Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-455-50264-0 .

literature

  • Emmanuel Alloa, "Die-hard gestures. Afterlife and visual testimony in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Rithy Panhs S21", in: Michael Hagner, Peter Geimer (eds.), Nachleben und reconstruction. The past in the picture , Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012, pp. 207–230.
  • Sylvie Rollet, Une éthique du regard: Le cinéma face à la Catastrophe, d'Alain Resnais à Rithy Panh , Paris: Editions Hermann, 2011

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cambodian film awarded in Cannes euronews.com, May 26, 2013, accessed on May 26, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Panh, Rithy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cambodian documentary filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Phnom Penh