The Missing Picture – Film Review

Writer-director Rithy Panh uses clay figures, archival footage and his narration to recreate the atrocities Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge committed between 1975 and 1979.

It’s incredible to be able to do so much with so little in a film. Poetic and tragic, The Missing Picture is really quite brilliant. Against all odds, the images are beautiful, the old film footage tells its own story, and the clay models really work.

This documentary is a meticulously realised, painstaking, total labour of love and it shows. With such minimalism up there on screen, it ought to be hard work seeing this, but in reality it’s thoughtful, informative and above all haunting and moving.

The Missing Picture is Oscar nominated for the 2014 Best Foreign Language Film of the Year from Cambodia. Rithy Panh won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard Award section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Documentary award at the 2013 Jerusalem Film Festival. The jury statement from there rightly said: ‘This is a riveting movie of the kind that has not been seen in years… The cinematic language is hauntingly poetic, never turning a horrifying history into the spectacle of itself.’

(C) Derek Winnert 2013 derekwinnert.com