Film

The Missing Picture

The Missing Picture (L'image manquante)[1] is a 2013 Cambodian-French documentary by Rithy Panh about his childhood under the Khmer Rouge.[2] It won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.[3]

Synopsis

Panh was 13 years old on April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, his hometown.[4][3] The film tells what his family suffered under the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979.[3] It shows the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, forced labor on dikes and rice paddies, communal living, hunger and executions.[4][5] In the new Kampuchea, personal belongings were forbidden, numbers replaced names, Western medicine was banned, clothes were dyed black, and a person could own only a spoon.[6] A 2014 festival notice put the number of people killed in those years at more than two million.[7]

The story is built around a search for one photograph taken during Khmer Rouge rule, a search that led through archives, old papers and villages in Cambodia.[8] In his narration Panh accepts that no single image could capture the injustice, and the film is the record of the search, not the picture itself.[7] Most surviving images from the period are Khmer Rouge propaganda.[3] The film sets these newsreels, with their smiling peasants in the fields and crowds applauding Pol Pot, "Brother Number One," against clay figures and dioramas that rebuild Panh's own memories.[6][9] It also includes images secretly filmed inside Kampuchea, whose photographers were killed, and pre-revolution footage of a woman performing traditional dance in full costume.[6]

Production and credits

Panh combines documentary footage, much of it taken from Khmer Rouge propaganda films, with clay figures and dioramas that depict deportation, forced labor, re-education and genocide.[10] Sculptor Sarith Mang carved and painted hundreds of the figures, which stand in detailed dioramas and are not animated.[11][2] They show Panh's parents, his family, Panh himself and key perpetrators, as well as monks, market women and water buffaloes.[2][6] Close-ups of hands shaping the clay recur through the film.[9]

Panh wrote the film with Christophe Bataille, and Catherine Dussart produced it for CDP, Bophana Production and Arte France.[11] Prum Mesa was the director of photography and Marc Marder composed the score.[4] Randal Douc is credited as the voice of the film, and Jean-Baptiste Phou narrates the English-language version.[1][10] The film is in French. Its running time is given as 92 minutes by IMDb and the Siskel Film Center and as 95 minutes by the Cambodia Town Film Festival, Rotten Tomatoes and the BFI.[5][12][8][11][9]

Release and reception

The film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Prix Un Certain Regard.[13] A festival notice called it the first Cambodian film to win the prize at Cannes.[7] The same year it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cinemanila International Film Festival and played at the Melbourne International Film Festival.[14][2] In 2014 it became the first Cambodian film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, at the 86th ceremony.[15][14] In 2016 it won the Lumière Award for Best Documentary and was nominated for the César Award for Best Documentary Film.[14]

Strand Releasing opened the film in limited release in the United States on March 19, 2014, and it began streaming on September 9, 2014.[11] On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 99 percent Tomatometer score from 87 reviews, and the critics consensus calls it emotionally searing and uniquely poignant.[11] Metacritic gives it a Metascore of 87 from 23 critics, which the site classes as universal acclaim.[16] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised the film's audacity and soulfulness.[12]

At the Cambodia Town Film Festival

The film is one of the films shown at the Cambodia Town Film Festival in Long Beach, California.

  • 2014: official selection; opening film, followed by a discussion with Rithy Panh.[8][7]

References 16
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Festival de Cannes, L'Image manquante (undated)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Melbourne International Film Festival, The Missing Picture (film archive)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, The Missing Picture
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Variety, Cannes Film Review: 'The Missing Picture' (2013-05-30)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 IMDb, The Missing Picture (2013) (2014-03-19)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Los Angeles Times, Review: 'The Missing Picture' a poetic study of Khmer Rouge horrors (2013-10-03)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Cambodia Town Film Festival, Matt Dillon, Crocodile Man, and Cambodian Cinema at Cambodia Town Film Fest This Saturday (archived)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Cambodia Town Film Festival, THE MISSING PICTURE – CTFF Officially Selected 2014 (archived)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 BFI, Sight and Sound, Film of the week: The Missing Picture (2014-01-07)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Seven Days, Margot Harrison, Movies You Missed and More: The Missing Picture (July 11, 2014)
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 Rotten Tomatoes, The Missing Picture
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Gene Siskel Film Center, The Missing Picture (2025-04-15)
  13. ↑ Festival de Cannes, Prix Un Certain Regard 2013 (2013)
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, The Missing Picture (2023)
  15. ↑ Cambodia Law and Policy Journal, Rithy Panh, The Missing Picture, Volume 3 (2014)
  16. ↑ Metacritic, The Missing Picture (undated)
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This page was last edited on 21 October 2026, at 08:33.