October 5, 2018
Graves without a name

Cambodia’s acclaimed filmmaker Rithy Panh has produced yet another emotional masterpiece through his ‘Graves Without A Name’. This latest documentary gives a more moving and intimate take on the historic Khmer Rouge regime and how he is continuously striving for peace and healing. Say Tola witnessed the screening of the documentary recently and speaks about the film’s rightful spot as the country’s entry to the 91st Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film category.

Every time Cambodia gets mentioned to outsiders – yes, every single time – people automatically associate it with the brutal slaughtering, mass killings, starvation, forced labour, arranged marriages and all tragic stories. Of course, the not-so-distant histories of Khmer Rouge regime and the civil war are still very much vivid in the minds of everyone. The shock, fear, desperation and pain remain in Cambodia’s memory.

But for those who have witnessed how Year Zero changed the Kingdom’s landscape – in the worst possible case – the confusion and longing for their loved ones who died unknowingly in the years-long chaos is an added burden they carry on their shoulders every waking moment. How exactly did they die? Why did they not survive? Where are they buried? Have they attained peace in the after-life? These questions can go on and on.
https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50539614/g ... ut-a-name/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... nUZsJLY558

https://scroll.in/reel/891396/graves-wi ... ge-horrors

Singapore: Cambodia’s Rithy Panh Remains Tireless Campaigner
8 December 2018
Cambodian master director Rithy Panh’s is not optimistic about the chances of his latest film “Graves Without A Name” doing well at the Oscars. It is Cambodia’s contender in the foreign language category.

“There is very little possibility. We have had screenings here and there, but the Oscar campaign costs more than my film. Most of the voters are from the U.S. and we don’t have the financial support to screen on the East coast and the West coast, and give people cocktails,” said Panh.

Panh has been a tireless cinematic chronicler of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. His 2013 film “The Missing Picture” scored an Oscar nomination. “First They Killed My Father,” produced by Panh and directed by Angelina Jolie, was Cambodia’s entry to the Oscars last year, but did not secure a nomination.

Panh says that though the current generation is post-Fascist, it is important that people don’t forget the past. “History repeats itself,” says Panh. “The language of world leaders today sounds just like Fascism.”

Panh’s next project will be about what he describes as “extreme violence.” “People talk about bombs and guns, but nobody tells you how to live after this destruction. Killing doesn’t end today or tomorrow, it can continue 20 years later,” he said. Panh will explore the trauma that people go through in the wake of violence.

Panh says that the current state of Cambodian cinema does not leave much room for local films. It is difficult to find screen space for independent films because of the large number of releases from the Hollywood studio majors. “This is a big problem for us,” Panh says. “I dream about the diversity of cinema with the digital formats. Digital is very good but sometimes it destroys everything around it.”

Panh received the Singapore International Film Festival’s honorary award on Saturday. “Graves Without A Name” played at the festival.
https://variety.com/2018/film/asia/camb ... 203085025/

Graves without a name
Rithy Panh revisits the horrors of the Khmer Rouge
By Frédéric Burnand in Geneva
This content was published on March 16, 2019 3:00 PM Mar 16, 2019 - 15:00

"My film aims to capture the invisible presence of the dead who have no grave and to combat the loss of memory that prevents wandering souls from finding rest," said director Rithy Panh
(CDP / ARTE FRANCE / ANUPHEAP PRODUCTION)

Cambodian film-maker Rithy Panh talks about his latest film, Graves without a name, being shown in Geneva, which explores the lasting effects of the Cambodian genocide.

His documentary is competing in the city's 17th International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights.

Many of the director’s 22 films external link have dealt directly with Cambodia’s genocide and its perpetrators, including The Missing Picture (2013), Exil (2016) and his latest, Graves with no name.

His new documentary focuses on a 13-year-old boy, representing Panh, who has lost most of his family in the genocide and begins a search for their graves. He travels to Trum, a “village in the middle of nowhere” in Battambang province. This is where Panh and ten of his family members were deported in 1975, along with many other Phnom Penh residents. In moving scenes, Panh, one of only two genocide survivors from his family, carries out funeral rites for his relatives who disappeared.

Interview: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/gr ... e/44827132

Critic’s Pick
‘Graves Without a Name’ Review: An Impossible Quest in Cambodia
The filmmaker Rithy Panh attempts to find where his parents, victims of the Khmer Rouge, are buried.
By Glenn Kenny
May 14, 2020

For years, people in the arts or in journalism have, in conversation, said of their vocation, “I didn’t choose it; it chose me.” At times this is an at least half-glib attempt to rationalize the often nonremunerative nature of their endeavors. But the truism gains some heft if looked at from a different angle.

Consider the film artists whose work could not escape, even had they wanted it to, a world-historic trauma that also had a profound personal meaning for them. One thinks of Claude Lanzmann and the Holocaust. One wonders what the Russian filmmaker Aleksei German would have done had Stalin never existed, or what the filmmaker Edward Yang’s oeuvre might look like had the specter of the militaristic Kuomintang government not haunted it.

Yang and German were fiction filmmakers. Lanzmann was a documentarian. The Cambodian-born director Rithy Panh, whose impetus for filmmaking was Pol Pot, works in both fiction and documentaries; the documentaries are especially distinctive and imaginative, and in recent years, more and more personal.

Panh’s father was a minister of education in the regime preceding that of the Khmer Rouge, which brutalized his family after coming to power. Panh escaped Cambodia as a teenager and discovered filmmaking during his education in France. His 2014 feature “The Missing Picture” grappled with his family tragedy and depicted its personages, including his mother and father, in the form of artful clay figurines.

In “Graves Without a Name,” Panh sets himself on a mission that he had to understand as impossible: to locate his parents’ burial sites. The movie’s opening scene shows the filmmaker having his head shaved during what appears to be a Buddhist prayer ritual. In a land that became known for its killing fields during Pol Pot’s reign — a land where today, we learn, farmers plowing their fields turn up stray human teeth and bone — finding specific victims of genocide is an undertaking that may require supernatural means. Late in the film, in one of its most strange and moving scenes, a woman conducts a séance of sorts in which she tells Panh of the spirit she’s conjured: “He recognizes his son.”
Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/movi ... eview.html