The Missing Picture

Although ostensibly an autobiographical narrative about his family's harrowing experiences during the Khmer Rouge terror of the 1970s, Cambodian director Rithy Panh's iconoclastic Oscar-nominated film takes quite a different stylistic tack from his previous documentaries on Cambodia's killing fields. The nightmarish scenarios his family experienced firsthand are re-created here by Panh using meticulously carved wooden and clay figures that he arranges in various situations in a number of different diorama-like artificial backgrounds, all with an accompanying voiceover. Adding crude but effective visual effects and a haunting downbeat violin-driven soundtrack, Panh creates a mesmerizing flow of images to animate his family's terrible hardships under the Pol Pot-led Communist takeover of once-thriving Phenom Penh. Although one might assume that this homespun approach would serve to trivialize the tragic events that befell Panh's family, the effect is actually just the opposite. Combining the figurine “actors” with starkly realist touches—such as integrating actual propagandistic documents and images from Khmer Rouge files—Panh brilliantly blurs the borders between the real and surreal, delivering a fascinating and moving portrait of his family's sufferings under a murderous despotic regime. Highly recommended. (M. Sandlin)