Cambodia's Panh up for Oscar glory

Cambodia's Panh up for Oscar glory

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

So Cambodia made it there first, leaving Thailand waiting anxiously. Last Thursday, the Oscars announced its nominees for the March 2 ceremony, and the biggest surprise, at least on this part of the world, is the Cambodian documentary The Missing Picture, which defied the odds and made the Best Foreign Language Film shortlist.

An autobiographical documentary and touching investigation into the power of image, The Missing Picture was directed by Rithy Panh, a respected figure in Khmer filmmaking. After being forced to work in a Khmer Rouge labour camp as a teenager, Panh fled to Bangkok and later to France, where he studied film.

The Cambodian movie will vie with four other titles for the Oscar: The Hunt, a tale of social stigmatisation from Denmark; The Broken Circle Breakdown, a drama from Belgium; Omar, a tense thriller about loyalty and betrayal from Palestine (their first, too); and The Great Beauty, an ode to the glory and decay of Rome, from Italy.

In terms of regional honour, The Missing Picture isn't officially the first film from Southeast Asia to receive an Oscar nomination. In 1994, The Scent Of Green Papaya, a rapturous drama by France-based Tran Anh Hung, represented Vietnam and was shortlisted (Tran is often categorised as an "overseas Vietnamese filmmaker").

Panh is based both in Paris and Phnom Penh. In The Missing Picture, the narration about the director's travails is in French (voiced by Randal Douc).

When Life interviewed Panh in Cannes last May, where the film won an award in the Un Certain Regard section, Panh spoke in French through an interpreter. He knows some Thai, too, though not enough to speak at length.

"It's very difficult to film what cannot be said, what cannot be told," he said, referring to his own experience as well as that of Cambodia's. "With this movie, I was trying to find the right way to do it. You have the technical problem and ethical problem _ it is difficult to film death. It's like when you travel and you don't know when you will arrive or if you will arrive. In this journey you know where you start but you don't know where or when it will end. I didn't do this film before because I couldn't."

Panh has made other films about the Khmer Rough atrocities before, notably S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), about the notorious prison in Phnom Penh; and Duch, Master Of The Forges Of Hell (2011), about the prison guard of that hellish torture centre.

Panh was in Phnom Penh on the night the nominations were announced. He went for a walk to calm down, then his friends started texting him about the news, according to Hollywood Reporter.

The Cambodian horror story isn't the only Southeast Asian representation at this year's Oscars. The documentary film The Act Of Killing, which revisits the commassacre of suspected communists in Indonesia in the 1960s, is also nominated for Best Documentary Feature.

The film was directed by American Joshua Oppenheimer, who lived in Indonesia in the mid 2000s. Officially however, the film doesn't represent Indonesia; due to its controversial content, The Act Of Killing wasn't released in the cinemas though it wasn't officially banned either.

As Thailand, which has the strongest film industry in the region, continues to wait for Oscar glory, Cambodia, whose film industry is only starting to re-emerge, managed to snatch the torch and bring a story (a sad story nevertheless) from Southeast Asia into the spotlight.

Come March 2, at least the region has something to root for.

_ Kong Rithdee

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