Rithy Panh

A fierce and controversial filmmaker, acclaimed for his documentaries. S21 — The Khmer Rouge's Killing Machine (2003) or The Missing Image (winner of Un Certain Regard In Cannes, in 2013), Rithy Panh (b. 1964) has made his life a haunting crusade for the truth about the events during the extermination of Democratic Kampuchea. An eleven-year-old child when the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh in 1975, he witnessed the years that followed the disappearance of his family—parents, siblings, and young nephews, one by one, executed or starved to death—and the programmed annihilation of the individual in the name of slogans and ideals. A refugee and educator in France, he has grappled throughout his life with the nature of evil, the memory of terror, and the euphemistic grammar of carnage, pointing his camera at an amnesiac people of survivors and torturers who seek to rebuild the country upon bones and mass graves. With the editor and novelist Christophe Bataille, he wrote, in addition to Elimination, La paix avec les morts (2020).