Cambodian Elegist: Rithy Panh in Person

BAMPFA is honored to welcome back the award-winning Cambodian French filmmaker Rithy Panh for a six-film retrospective after his memorable 2022 visit here. This series also follows up on our successful 2024 Cambodian Cinema series and our ongoing archival collaboration with the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, which Panh helped cofound.

This series dives deeper into Panh’s oeuvre, going beyond his now-classic Khmer Rouge–focused documentaries to showcase strikingly brilliant essay films like The Missing Picture (2013) and Everything Will Be OK (2022), which blend personal history, archival footage, and even dioramas and animation to investigate national history, cultural memory, and the human capacity to both inflict atrocity and survive it.

We also spotlight both his debut narrative film, the powerful neo-realist rural drama Rice People(1994), set in the rice fields of the Cambodian countryside, and the gritty One Evening After the War (1998), with its doomed romance set amidst a neon-and-dust-choked Phnom Penh; both titles are remarkable for their portrayals of a country and a people just emerging from nearly two decades of war. We continue with his most recent narrative, Meeting with Pol Pot(2024), an investigation of how unchecked power can turn information into misinformation.

For Panh, inspired by visionary filmmakers like Chris Marker and Dziga Vertov, the divisions between “narrative” and “documentary” have little meaning. “Sometimes fiction cannot be filmed well,” he wrote. “So, I try new forms to express, to experiment.” “Panh has long pursued new ways of seeing modern history’s most resonant nightmares,” critic David Ehrlich noted, “to reconcile the unimaginable with its absent sense of reality, and weaponize past trauma into a deterrent against the devastation to come.”

—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

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