Rithy Panh was 13 years old in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power and, led by Pol Pot, determined to fulfill their dream of a pure, revolutionary Cambodia. They emptied the capital, Phnom Penh, of its 2 million inhabitants, and forced them into re-education camps in the countryside. Panh’s entire family eventually died, along with countless others.
The victims were first stripped of every possession. And so the director constructs his extraordinary movie from dioramas peopled with hand-molded clay figures, which are carved and painted on camera in an act both gentle and defiant. Panh uses the props and eerie clips from Khmer Rouge propaganda newsreels to tell about his family, and his country. Along with starkly poetic narration, read by Randal Douc, the effect is devastating, without a single scene of actual bloodshed.
Recurring images of crumbling film canisters remind us of what film can and can’t record. “I wish to be rid of this picture, so I show it to you,” says the narrator, after one shattering recollection. Panh’s technique achieves things a conventional documentary could not, as when he pans across dozens of the clay figures jumbled in a box, in a shot that calls up both the toys of childhood, and graves.