Rithy Panh

Takes its title from the T-shirt slogan of a teenager who was killed in the Myanmar protests. The film will feature puppet figurines, and will see about totalitarianism, democracy, and a new way of communication.

"Life in 24 Frames a Second" is a film about hardship, misfortune, perseverance and triumph. The personal stories of John Woo (The Killer), Anurag Kashyap (Sacred Games), Rithy Panh (The Missing Picture) and Lav Diaz (The Woman Who Left), who survived extreme poverty, disease, sexual abuse, genocide and civil war to go on to become maestros of world cinema. 'Survivors' united by their abiding love of the movies.

A film about people who have survived the irradiation of war and recommended to those who believe they are immune to it.

5.6/10
10%

Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones. Produced by Strand Releasing and Connor Jessup.

5.7/10

An innocent Cambodian boy is sold to a Thai broker and enslaved on a fishing trawler. As fellow slaves are tortured and murdered around him, he starts to wonder if his only hope of freedom is to become as violent as his captors.

7.4/10
9.2%

After The Missing Picture (Un Certain Regard winner 2013 and Oscar nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2013) and Exile, Rithy Panh continues his personal and spiritual exploration. S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell analyzed the mechanisms of the crime. Graves Without a Name searches for a path to peace. When a thirteen-year-old child, who lost the greater part of his family under the Khmer rouge, embarks on a search for their graves, whether clay or on spiritual ground, what does he find there? And above all, what is he looking for? Spectral trees? Villages defaced beyond recognition? Witnesses who are reluctant to speak? The ethereal touch of a brother or sister’s body as the night approaches? A cinematic movie that reaches well beyond the story of a country for that which is universal.

6.5/10

A 5-year-old girl embarks on a harrowing quest for survival amid the sudden rise and terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

7.2/10
8.7%

Exil is a visionary narration of the exile of Cambodians during the Red Khmer regime, during which the country was renamed Democratic Kampuchea.

6.1/10

In an emotional tribute, Montreal graffiti artist Fonki returns to Cambodia to paint a giant mural of his relatives killed in the genocide. During his time there, he connects with a group of Cambodian youth who have also returned hoping to breathe new life into their destroyed culture.

8.5/10

If you would like to witness the forces of colonialism in brute action, Rithy Panh’s extraordinary new film provides the long view. A masterpiece of editing, the film assembles archival footage and antiqued title cards into a wordless recapturing of the Indochinese Empire, beginning with the early days of French occupation. In this prelapsarian age, everything is golden with promise. Ladies, in empire waist gowns and enormous hats, throw candies to local children. Great steamships carry French culture abroad, and the Tricolore flag flies on high.

7.3/10

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

7.4/10
9.9%

Between 1975 and 1979, at least 250,000 Cambodian women were forced into marriages by the Khmer Rouge. Sochan was one of them. At the age of 16, she was forced to marry a soldier who raped her. After 30 years of silence, Sochan decided to bring her case to the international tribunal set up to try former Khmer Rouge leaders.

8.7/10

When an American plane crashes in the Cambodian jungle, the pilot is taken captive by the Khmer Rouge. They instruct the kids of a village to keep an eye on the prisoner. While the younger kids gradually become friends with the stranger, the older boy called Pang has a different attitude. Since he grew up without parents, he accepted the Khmer rouge as his replacement parents and endears himself to them by betraying villagers. When Pang becomes responsible for watching the prisoner, things become worse for the pilot.

7.1/10

Kavich Neang’s first film is a short documentary following Sory Chan, a 14-year-old boy who is living in Phnom Penh apart from his family. A student of Cambodian classical music, Sory lives with his mother’s friend after his mother fled a debt she couldn’t afford to pay back. Each evening after class, he carries a scale outside in a popular part of the city and asks people to weigh themselves for a small amount of money. In this urgent film, we witness Sory’s day in class, his nightly routine and a particularly difficult conversation with his mother who he meets on the street.

The film centers around a young French widow and her two adolescent children attempt to carve out a meager life for themselves by farming rice fields alongside the ocean in French Indo-China in the 1930's. Their efforts are hampered each year by the presence of the sea, which invariably floods the fields with saltwater and wipes out the crops. In desperation, the mother realizes that their only hope lies in the construction of a sea wall to prevent continued flooding, but the mother must cut a swath through the local bureaucracy in an almost Sisyphean attempt to make this happen. Meanwhile, her obstinate daughter, Suzanne, draws the romantic obsessions of a well-to-do Chinese gentleman, Monsieur Jo; though he could easily provide a way out, the possibility of a romantic relationship between Jo and Suzanne could just as easily fall prey to local racial prejudices that would damage or ruin the lives of both.

6.1/10

During the last half-century, Cambodia has witnessed genocide, decades of war and the collapse of social order. Now, documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh looks at an irreparable tragedy that is less visible, yet no less pervasive: the spiritual death that results when young women are forced into prostitution. Angry and impassioned, PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS presents the searing stories of poor Asian women whose lives were violated and their destinies destroyed when their bodies were turned into items of sexual commerce.

7.4/10

A blend of fact and fiction, based on the actual lives of the actors, the film depicts a troupe of actors and dancers struggling to practice their art in the burned-out shell of Cambodia's former national theater, the Preah Suramarit National Theater in Phnom Penh.

6.9/10

In Angkor Wat, we follow a boy and his relationships with the people who live there, the ruins, and the tourists. The legends and magical stories depicted on the stones of the temple remains overlap with the reality of modern Cambodia. The lingering pain left by years of civil war, the gap between conditions in the cities and the countryside, and the thoughts of the boy who has lost sight of the future are conveyed at a leisurely rhythm with beautiful imagery that gently evokes emotion in the viewer.

Documentary of the S-21 genocide prison in Phnom Penh with interviews of prisoners and guards. On the search for reasons why this could have happened.

7.3/10
9.4%

In 1999 a fibre-glas wire was installed from Thailand to Vietnam straight trough Cambodia. Rithy Panh shows us the work done in Cambodia to connect Khmer-society to "modern world". Farmers, soldiers and children work for a living there and unearthen skulls and bones -their remains from PolPot-regime you can see. The fear in their mind is portrayed by Rithy Panh in this documentary. As the other work done by Rithy Panh this deals with his people. I like it very much! The movie was awarded 1999 at "Visions du Réel" in Nyon (Switzerland) and at "Cinéma du Réel" in Paris.

7.6/10

Set in the newly-pacified Phnom Penh, this film is about the return to civilian life of Cambodian soldiers.

6.9/10

A poor, rural Cambodian family slowly disintegrates during the cycle of a single rice crop in this moving, and beautifully photographed European drama adapted from a novel by Shahnon Ahmad. Pouev, his wife Om, and his seven children, live in a small rural village in Cambodia. Their whole precarious life depends upon the success of their rice crop. Both husband and wife are worried, but for different reasons. Pouev is concerned because their acreage is shrinking. Om worries about Pouev; what would happen to her and the children if he died or was injured? Her worst fear is manifest after Pouev steps upon a poisoned thorn and dies. Om finds herself heavily burdened with the responsibilities of maintaining the crop and caring for seven youngsters. She suffers paranoia from worrying about whether the children are doing their share and the other villagers lock her up leaving eldest daughter Sokha to bring in the crop.

7.3/10

Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé reveals his passion for cinema, Africa and the world to Cambodian director Rithy Panh.

After having fled Pol Pot, Rithy Panh, a 15 year old Cambodian finds refuge at the Mairut camp in Thailand, in 1979. Ten years later, now a filmmaker, he returns to the camps to film the daily life of this threatened people. The peoples he meets, eaten away by inactivity, insecutity and the fear of being forgotten, have been waiting for a possible return to Cambodia.

7.9/10

Wandering Souls follows the mounting of a new stage production, Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, to honour the nearly 2 million Cambodians who died during the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. Commissioned by Cambodian Living Arts, the Requiem is a first-time collaboration between filmmaker Rithy Panh and composer Dr. Him Sophy. The film tracks the story of the Cambodian creators and musicians, as they work with an international team to bring the production to the world stage. Alongside the evolving stage production, the film tells the first-hand survival stories of the Cambodians involved in the Requiem, and their powerful will to reclaim an artistic heritage that disappeared during the four years of Pol Pot terror.

7/10