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Rithy Panh brings genocide memories to Cannes
Cambodia's best-known director Rithy Panh has returned with a harrowing new picture about the national memory of his country's genocide.
Rithy Panh, Cambodia's best-known director, has returned to the Cannes film festival with a harrowing new picture about the national memory of his country's genocide.
"I believe in the role of art in society, especially in the case of Cambodia where it was attacked under the Khmer Rouge regime," Panh told after a screening of The Burnt Theatre which is appearing out of competition.
The director is a regular at Cannes, where he presented Rice People in the 1994 competition, One Evening After the War in the festival's Un Certain Regard section in 1998 and S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine in 2003 in which he depicted an unexpected meeting between victims and perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide.
"People's expression has never been as threatened as it is today (in Cambodia). The technology is there, the economy is there. It is strange that no place is given to cultural expression," he said, blaming the popularity of television and a nationwide desire to forget.
Panh's new film documents the tragic fate of the national theatre of Phnom Penh and its role in the Cambodian consciousness.
"The theater was built in the 1960s but the Khmer Rouge did not destroy it. They kept it to show propaganda plays and receive delegations but they didn't blow it up," he said.
"After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, some survivors managed to revive the traditional Khmer theater but it burned down 10 years ago and no one has rebuilt it," he said.
"This story of my film is that hole in the middle of the city, practically a hole in its memory."
Panh traces the story of the theater's actors, who were also abandoned without a job and without a future, left only to get by with their memories.
"We speak of cultural diversity these days but not of the broad spectrum of memory. But it is memory today that is at stake today - countries that come to terms with their memories continue to develop but under-developed countries find themselves imposing another memory which is not their own," he warned.
"All my films deal with memory," said Panh, who escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge labor camps himself at the age of 15.
Panh's 1989 documentary Site 2 confronted the horror of the camps while the 1999's The Land of the Wandering Souls told the story of a fibreglass wire stretching from Thailand to Vietnam, the digging for which turned up the remains of dozens of victims of Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia.
The ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot seized power in 1975, killing up to two million people as they pursued an agrarian utopia in which Cambodians were herded out of cities and the countryside was turned into a vast labor camp.
