Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy

Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (French: Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne) is a 1996 documentary film by Rithy Panh. It tells the story of Hout Bophana and her husband Ly Sitha, a former Buddhist monk who joined the Khmer Rouge. The film draws on their letters and on the confessions they were forced to make in the Khmer Rouge prison S-21, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It was made for television. The Bophana Center, which Rithy Panh founded in Phnom Penh about ten years after the film, is named after her.

Film details
Director	Rithy Panh
Format	Feature
Kind of film	Documentary
First released	1996
Original language	Khmer; French
Production country	France, Cambodia
Running time	59 minutes
Subjects	Film & Moving Image; History & Remembrance
Creator pages	Rithy Panh

Story

In the paper Paulo Roberto Ramos wrote on the film, Sitha becomes a Buddhist monk in Phnom Penh, then leaves to fight Lon Nol's government with the communists under the name Comrade Deth. After the Khmer Rouge victory he is sent to work for the commerce ministry. Ramos writes that it was the couple's love letters that brought both of them to S-21. The Cambodia Daily, describing the film, wrote that Bophana was made to work in the fields of Baray district in Kampong Thom province. It quoted one of her letters to Sitha: "But every day I live in Baray, I lose a year of age."

The film sets the couple's letters, tender at times and desperate at others, beside the accounts of survivors and of people who knew them. Ramos describes its form as a traditional documentary of archive images, interviews and a narrator's voice. It opens on stacks of handwritten files in Khmer while the narrator reads from the autobiography Bophana wrote in prison. In her letters she wrote as Sita, the heroine of the Reamker. For Rithy Panh, Ramos writes, the letters were a form of resistance, because they held two things the regime treated as dangerous: love and culture.

The film ends on the photograph taken of Bophana when she arrived at S-21 and a photograph of Sitha as a monk. Its closing captions, as Ramos gives them, give March 18, 1977 as the date both were killed. The festival's note on the film also gives March 1977 for their execution at S-21. Other accounts differ on the year: The Cambodia Daily's 2002 report gave 1978.

Production

Rithy Panh directed the film and wrote its script. The French national library's catalog credits the text to James Burnet and the music to Marc Marder, and the festival's record names Jacques Pamart as director of photography. It was produced by CDP Production, the Institut national de l'audiovisuel and France 3. The film runs 59 minutes, in Khmer and French, and a DVD edition distributed by the Centre national de la cinématographie dates from 2008.

Screenings

In February 2002, The Cambodia Daily wrote that the film was being shown free twice a day at Tuol Sleng. The museum's director, Chey Sopheara, told the paper that it had played in France but had not been screened in Cambodia before. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, said that it would teach young people the truth of their history. In 2016 the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes showed it in a program of Rithy Panh's films, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has shown it in a series on Cambodian cinema.

Legacy

Bophana's photograph hangs with hundreds of others on the walls of the former prison. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, of the University of Valencia, has followed her story from 1985, when the journalist Elizabeth Becker found her file in the Tuol Sleng archives. He writes that, above all through Rithy Panh's work, Bophana has become an icon of grief and resistance far beyond Cambodia. Scholars in Brazil have also written about the film and the method behind it.

References