Film

The Missing Picture

The Missing Picture (L'image manquante) is a 2013 Cambodian-French documentary by Rithy Panh about his childhood under the Khmer Rouge.[1][2] It won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.[1][3]

Synopsis

Panh was 13 years old on April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, his hometown.[4][3] The film tells what his family suffered under the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979.[3] It shows the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, forced labor on dikes and rice paddies, communal living, hunger and executions.[4][5] In the new Kampuchea, personal belongings were forbidden, numbers replaced names, Western medicine was banned, clothes were dyed black, and a person could own only a spoon.[6] The film deals with the loss of cultural identity and the erasure of the individual under the regime.[1] A 2014 festival notice put the number of people killed in those years at more than two million.[7]

The story is built around a search for one photograph taken during Khmer Rouge rule, a search that led through archives, old papers and villages in Cambodia.[8] In his narration Panh accepts that no single image could capture the injustice, and the film is the record of the search, not the picture itself.[7] Most surviving images from the period are Khmer Rouge propaganda.[3] The film sets these newsreels, with their smiling peasants in the fields and crowds applauding Pol Pot, "Brother Number One," against clay figures and dioramas that rebuild Panh's own memories.[6][9] It also includes images secretly filmed inside Kampuchea, whose photographers were killed, and pre-revolution footage of a woman performing traditional dance in full costume.[6]

Production and credits

About half of the film is news and documentary footage. The rest uses clay figures to show the effect of the genocide on Cambodian people and society.[1] Sculptor Sarith Mang carved and painted hundreds of the figures, which stand in detailed dioramas and are not animated.[10][2] They show Panh's parents, his family, Panh himself and key perpetrators, as well as monks, market women and water buffaloes.[2][6] Close-ups of hands shaping the clay recur through the film.[9]

Panh wrote the film with Christophe Bataille, and Catherine Dussart produced it for CDP, Bophana Production and Arte France.[10] Prum Mesa was the director of photography and Marc Marder composed the score.[4] Randal Douc narrates the original French version, and Jean-Baptiste Phou narrates the English version.[1] The film is in French. Its running time is given as 92 minutes by IMDb and the Siskel Film Center and as 95 minutes by the Cambodia Town Film Festival, Rotten Tomatoes and the BFI.[5][11][8][10][9]

Release and reception

The film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won its top prize.[1] A festival notice called it the first Cambodian film to win the prize at Cannes.[7] The same year it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema section of the Cinemanila International Film Festival and played at the Melbourne International Film Festival.[1][2] Cambodia submitted it for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, and its nomination in 2014 was the country's first in that category.[1][10] It won Best Documentary at the 21st Lumière Awards and was nominated for Best Documentary Film at the 41st César Awards.[1]

Strand Releasing opened the film in limited release in the United States on March 19, 2014, and it began streaming on September 9, 2014.[10] On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 99 percent Tomatometer score from 87 reviews, and the critics consensus calls it emotionally searing and uniquely poignant.[10] Metacritic lists a score of 87 out of 100 from 23 critics, which the site classes as universal acclaim.[1] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised the film's audacity and soulfulness.[11]

At the Cambodia Town Film Festival

The film is one of the films shown at the Cambodia Town Film Festival in Long Beach, California.

  • 2014: official selection; opening film, followed by a discussion with Rithy Panh.[8][7]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Wikipedia, The Missing Picture (2013-05-23)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Melbourne International Film Festival, The Missing Picture (film archive)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, The Missing Picture
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Variety, Cannes Film Review: 'The Missing Picture' (2013-05-30)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 IMDb, The Missing Picture (2013) (2014-03-19)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Los Angeles Times, Review: 'The Missing Picture' a poetic study of Khmer Rouge horrors (2013-10-03)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Cambodia Town Film Festival, Matt Dillon, Crocodile Man, and Cambodian Cinema at Cambodia Town Film Fest This Saturday (archived)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Cambodia Town Film Festival, THE MISSING PICTURE – CTFF Officially Selected 2014 (archived)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 BFI, Sight and Sound, Film of the week: The Missing Picture (2014-01-07)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 Rotten Tomatoes, The Missing Picture
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Gene Siskel Film Center, The Missing Picture (2025-04-15)
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This page was last edited on 27 September 2026, at 06:00.