With the help of miniature clay figurines and fragments of archival footage, the director returns to the time of his childhood in the surprising documentary The Image That Doesn't Exist and conjures up an unforgettable image of the unimaginable: life and death during Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime.
"There are so many images in the world that we think we have seen everything, thought about everything. I have been looking for the missing picture for years. A photograph taken between 1975 and 1979, during his time ruling Cambodia, recorded Khmer Rouge. Of course, the picture itself does not prove mass murder, but it makes us think. Towards making history. I searched in vain for her in archives, in documents, in the Cambodian countryside. Now I know: this picture must be missing… in fact, I wasn't even looking for it. Wouldn't it be obscene and meaningless? That's why I created it myself. What I offer you today is not a particular image or a search for a single image, it is an image of a search: a search made possible by film. Some images must always be missing and others must constantly replace them: in this movement there is life, struggle, pain and beauty, the sadness of lost faces and the understanding of what once was. Sometimes nobility, even courage - but never oblivion," says the director of the documentary film A picture that is not Rithy Panh.
A picture that doesn't exist premiered on festival in Cannes, where she received the main prize in the Special View, nominated but it is also for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Documentary film
A picture that doesn't exist
(L'image manquante, France, Cambodia, 2013)
Directed by: Rithy Panh. Voice: Randal Douc.
21. 3., Kinodvor
