RityRithy PanhPanh’s Top 10Top 10
“Poetry is possible, even after genocide” Through his films, French-Cambodian filmmaker Rity Panh carefully and painstakingly attempts to reconstruct Cambodia’s recent past under the Khmer Rouge and the aftershocks of a regime that destroyed a quarter of the country’s population. For IDFA 2013, he has selected 10 films that he feels deeply connected with. Was it hard to select these 10 films?
“It was very hard because I like a lot of films. Curiously, I don’t like to talk so much about them. In the end, I tried to choose films that reflect me, my involvement with the world and my sincerity in filmmaking.” They all explore the complex relationship between truth and fiction, an element that is also very present in your own films.
“A documentary has quality when there is some element of fiction in it. Take In Vanda’s Room. Where does the fiction end? I don’t know, but it’s a documentary film. Or take A Man Vanishes: at the end we discover that maybe everything we’ve been watching was fiction. Or take Cassavetes’s films, which are not in the selection. When one of his actors expresses a deep-felt belief, or if the take lasts more than a minute, you could argue that the film stops being a fiction film. In Alone, Wang Bing’s version of the life of these three young girls living alone in the mountains is his version, but through the long takes, he manages to capture something close to reality.”
“Of course: we both make films about these enormous subjects like genocide and human dignity. But Lanzmann always refused to use images, such as archive footage or painting, except in his latest film. I don’t refuse anything because, again, a documentary is not reality, it’s my reality. I can never know what exactly happened in my country’s past under the Khmer Rouge. Only the victims and the perpetrators know something. What I can do is use what’s at my disposal to approach the truth. But another director can make another S21. My film is not definitive, it’s not the end of history. It’s more like a false mirror.” Lanzmann is sometimes very present in the frame. You never do that.
“There is no need for me to be there. I like to give all the screen time to the people I interview. Even the time outside of the frame. Sometimes I give them a question an hour before I start filming, to give them a chance to remember and try to find the right words, to find something much more precise in their memory. Sometimes I shoot directly, like Lanzmann or Jean Rouch or Wang Bing. Sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes I come back one year later and ask the same question. It took me three years to make S21. You know,
Milestones
In Vanda’s Room
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Going back in time, do you feel your searches into Cambodia’s past started out in the footsteps of Claude Lanzmann?