Affecting documentary is a feat of clay
IN THE 3D whizz-bang “Yes I’m connected” age in which we live, there is less and less room for simplicity. A story told in cinema without bells and whistles is often rejected by mainstream audiences because it doesn’t distract them sufficiently from their popcorn and nachos. Documentaries have a particularly hard time attracting a big crowd and having been robbed of their natural place on TV by pseudo reality series, they now have to take their chances on the big screen.
Rithy Panh had a story to tell. Born in Cambodia, he lived through the horrors that took place in his native country during the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The filmmaker was just a boy at the time, and with so few surviving family members, personal belongings or any film footage from a childhood spent in a bloody Orwellian society, there was minimal content available to make an autobiographical production. But that did not deter him.
With ingenuity and imagination, he has pulled his tragic tale together by using dioramas and forlorn clay figures, which we see him creating as the story is narrated. Weirdly, these little handmade people, used to represent the intellectual city dwellers forced into labour and mind control camps by the ruling army, convey emotion beyond the scope of some actors. Their anguish is never lost on us as we listen to the lyrical narration that explains how they were ordered to build roads and dig ditches. They died in huge numbers in what we now know as the Killing Fields.
Not surprisingly, Panh was a moviebuff when he was younger, but Pol Pot replaced the mainstream with his own propaganda films, which the director intersperses thoroughout.
While watching The Missing Pic- ture, I could not help thinking that this unusual way of recalling a horrific period in one country’s history would serve just as well as a medium for Holocaust stories and, perhaps, help children to comprehend them in a more palatable way. For his efforts Panh won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and though an award is no compensation for a tragic past, it helps to spread the understanding of it.