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Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh

Directing

Biography

Rithy Panh (Khmer: ប៉ាន់ រិទ្ធី) is a French-Cambodian director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, actor and writer. During the years 1975 and following in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, he lost his parents and part of his family, and young Rithy witnessed the worst atrocities. He survived in 1979 where he managed to reach the Mairut camp in Thailand then arrived in France in 1980. Rithy Panh is the author of numerous works which all have as a backdrop a Cambodia which is having difficulty dressing its pieces of theater and Where Rithy demonstrates his talent for immortalizing slices of life in which the protagonists give the impression of engaging while forgetting the camera. His work is imbued with the work of memory and the pain of survivors of the Pol Pot regime. He tries to rediscover Cambodian culture through cinema.

Known For

Graves Without a Name
5.0

After The Missing Picture (Un Certain Regard winner 2013 and Oscar nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2013) and Exile, Rithy Panh continues his personal and spiritual exploration. S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell analyzed the mechanisms of the crime. Graves Without a Name searches for a path to peace. When a thirteen-year-old child, who lost the greater part of his family under the Khmer rouge, embarks on a search for their graves, whether clay or on spiritual ground, what does he find there? And above all, what is he looking for? Spectral trees? Villages defaced beyond recognition? Witnesses who are reluctant to speak? The ethereal touch of a brother or sister’s body as the night approaches? A cinematic movie that reaches well beyond the story of a country for that which is universal.

Graves Without a Name

2019Movie
The Sea Wall
5.3

The film centers on a young French widow and her two adolescent children as they attempt to carve out a meager life for themselves by farming rice fields alongside the ocean in French Indo-China in the 1930s. Their efforts are hampered each year by the presence of the sea, which invariably floods the fields with saltwater and wipes out the crops. In desperation, the mother realizes that their only hope lies in the construction of a sea wall to prevent continued flooding, but the mother must cut a swath through the local bureaucracy in an almost Sisyphean attempt to make this happen. Meanwhile, her obstinate daughter, Suzanne, draws the romantic obsessions of a well-to-do Chinese gentleman, Monsieur Jo. Though he could easily provide a way out, the possibility of a romantic relationship between Jo and Suzanne could just as easily fall prey to local racial prejudices that would damage or ruin the lives of both.

The Sea Wall

2009Movie