Cambodian-French film director Rithy Panh discusses fact and fiction in cinema, why documentary is an essential medium, and his spat with TikTok.
Rithy Panh, director of “Rice People” and “S21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” is an icon of art-house cinema, at once political, unique, and charming. The iconic image may be another of his confections – a palatable work built on uncomfortable facts.
On the incomplete evidence of a 50-minute on-stage dialog at the Busan International Film Festival on Sunday, Panh comes across as simultaneously contrarian and principled. A curmudgeonly veteran and yet a filmmaker still curious to learn.
“If there were no Khmer Rouge maybe I would not be a filmmaker,” he said of the Communist insurgents, who won the Cambodian civil war in 1975 and whose brutality and atrocities he has spent a lifetime documenting and exposing.
Panh’s family lost everything to the marauding Khmer Rouge or during their five-year rule. He was internally deported into the rice fields, escaped to Thailand and later became a refugee sent to France.
“I dreamed of having a camera to record what was happening,” he said. “[At one moment] I wanted to go to Australia, where I heard they have lots of desert, and to get lost. The UN told me instead that I was going to France.”
There, he tried to establish himself as a painter – focusing on other genocides including those in Auschwitz and Palestine – and later began his formal training as a filmmaker.
