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Rithy Panh’s “The Missing Picture”, opens in cinema

The documentary was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2014 Academy Awards and opens in cinemas on the 11th of April

The Cambodian documentary The Missing Picture, directed by renowned film maker Rithy Panh, opens in Barcelona cinemas on the 11th of April backed by two significant credits: top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival and a nomination for Best Foreign Film in the 2014 Academy Awards.

The film is based on a book written by the director (The elimination, written in conjunction with Christophe Bataille) and tells the first-person account of the occupation of Cambodia beginning on the 17th of April, 1975, when Pol Pot’s communist regime took the capital city, Phnom Penh, and Rithy Panh was just 11 years old. The city’s inhabitants were sent to work in rehabilitation camps and, in an attempt to eliminate all vestiges of class division, all their personal effects were confiscated, their names were replaced by numbers and they were subjected to constant torture and execution.

In his search for “missing picture” of the years of Khmer Rouge government, Panh filmed the documentary using clay figurines superimposed on the narrative, a revolutionary idea that allows the film maker to evoke and reflect on the horrors of the time from a truly unconventional perspective.

The Institut Francès de Barcelona will host a free screening of the film at 8.30 pm on the day before it opens in cinemas.

Publication date: Tuesday, 08 April 2014
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