The Missing Picture is Cambodian director Rithy Panh's memoir of his teenage years spent in a punitive Khmer Rouge labor camp. The experience is so unbearably traumatic & dehumanizing that Panh is nearly incapable of communicating it. The film includes period footage & Khmer Rouge propoganda films, but his accounts of camp life & his idyllic childhood before the revolution are depicted with toy-like dioramas peopled with rough-hewn, painted figurines carved out of clay. The device is jarring. Panh's remembrances are read by an actor in voice over & feel matter-of-fact, introspective & emotionally stunted.
The Missing Picture plays at the
Mill Valley Film Festival on
October 12th & 13th. The festival program says it is in French, but the version I saw at a preview screening had a voice-over in English.
§ The Missing Picture (L'image manquante)
Director: Rithy Panh
Cambodia, France, 2013, 92 mins.
Mill Valley Film Festival 36
Lark Theatre, Sat, Oct 12 4:45 PM
Rafael 3, Sun, Oct 13 5:30 PM
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