Sometimes silence is a scream.

The Missing Picture
Rithy Panh 2013 Cambodia/France
Documentary

There have been several documentaries confronting oppressive, despotic regimes in the last couple of years, among them Dror Moreh's The Gatekeepers (interviewing the former heads of the Shin Bet) and Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary, monstrous The Act Of Killing (meeting the still-in-power perpetrators of the Indonesian anti-communist genocide of the 1960's and filming them willingly re-enacting their crimes in the manner of any film genre they want), and most have been quite rightly given high acclaim. Rithy Panh's portrait of the reign of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot's attempts to 'socially re-engineer' Cambodia, a period which resulted in the deaths of almost a quarter of the population of the country, is the latest in this line but remains distinctly different from any of the former as well as practically any other film I've ever seen. For one, Panh actually lived through this period and spent most of his teenage years as a forced resident of the regime's many labour camps. It's a subject Panh has visited repeatedly, chiefly in his horrifying 2003 work S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine, and a time he talks about frighteningly openly but the central problem is that, while Panh recalls torturers filming executions being carried out, there is very little footage or photographic evidence of the period, and certainly not of Panh's memories, images that he says he wouldn't be allowed to show anyway. So, instead of going through what would be a herculean task and trying to create a fictional feature based around that time (again, one that may have to suffer massive cuts to even find a release), he decided on a much more innovative, slyly fitting method; carving accurate clay figures of the people and the settings involved and attempted to reconstruct moments from his past. These dramatizations make up at least half of the film and are narrated using Panh's own words and addressing his feelings about the real-life incidents recreated on screen by an actor, presumably because Panh himself would have had trouble keeping his composure. The voice is really the heart of the film, never wavering even as it describes the 'disappearance' of Panh's brother, the fatal hunger-strike of his father ("His suit is white, his tie is dark, I want to hold him close) and the eventual death of his entire family. It's almost as if he can't even feel anger or grief anymore, like any emotion has been crushed from his body by the sheer force of the atrocity he's gone through, and yet you know without doubt that it won't ever leave him and you're positive he'll never get over it, almost as if he's trapped underneath the strangely malevolent waves that open and close the film. Much like the aforementioned works of last year The Missing Picture isn't an easy watch, in fact it's about as far away from that description as you can get, but in its grim, nightmarish, hallucinatory ninety-two minutes it's one of the best and certainly most important films of the year, allowing us a glimpse into a episode of history almost unfathomable to inhabitants of the West. Everybody needs to see this.