Zina Saunders

It takes a hardy soul to scrap a year-and-a-half's worth of filming and start again from the beginning with an entirely different approach. But that is what the documentary maker Rithy Panh did after discovering the dramatic potential of re-enacting his childhood memories of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79) using dozens of hand-carved, painted clay figurines. The creative gamble has paid off handsomely as "The Missing Picture" goes down in history as the first Cambodian film ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.

It is all the more remarkable for Mr. Panh's documentary to be nominated in the best foreign-film category, where the four other nominees are works of fiction. "What makes me so happy about this nomination is that it shows that cinema is about more than just fiction," says the soft-spoken Mr. Panh on the telephone from his home in Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. "I think it's a brave decision and one which can be of comfort to other documentary makers—it pushes the limit of what can be nominated."

Mr. Panh, who divides his time between Phnom Penh and Paris, where he fled after the fall of Pol Pot's regime in 1979, shares his pride with an entire nation. "People in Cambodia are really happy that the film has been nominated," says the 51-year-old director. "It shows artistically that we are at a good level and that we can exist in an international context. But perhaps most importantly it shows the rest of the world that we're capable of facing up to our own history."
Since graduating from film school in Paris in 1985, Mr. Panh has made it his principal mission as a documentary maker to expose the terrible depths of the Cambodian genocide that cost the lives of as many as two million people through starvation, overwork and summary execution. Among those who died were Mr. Panh's parents and all his siblings except for one elder sister who managed to escape with him to a refugee camp in Thailand.
"I didn't survive because I was stronger than others," says Mr. Panh. "I survived because my family and friends helped me to survive. They took my place. My job is to give them back their dignity, tell their story and say their names. You know we trot out a figure like two million dead, but where is the distinction in that? As part of a number nobody is different, and that's what's terrible. We shouldn't forget that behind each life lost was a unique human being."
In previous documentaries like "S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine" (2003), about the notorious Tuol Sleng security prison in Phnom Penh, and "Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell" (2011), about convicted war criminal Kaing Guek Eav (better known by his nom de guerre, Duch), Mr. Panh has confronted the murderous methodology of the Khmer Rouge killing machine. For "S21," Mr. Panh's decision to persuade former prison guards to return to Tuol Sleng and re-enact their crimes has proved hugely influential.
American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has said that Mr. Panh's approach inspired his own recently Oscar-nominated documentary "The Act of Killing" about Indonesia's little-reported killing fields. "I'm not someone who has to make a film at any cost," says Mr. Panh. "I have to find the right way to make it or not at all. 'S21' was a film about corporeal memory and how the same gestures repeated many times years earlier can be reawakened."
Mr. Panh agrees that "The Missing Picture" is his most personal documentary to date, the only one where he uses the first person. He adapted the screenplay from his autobiography, "The Elimination," which was published in English last year. The film's title stems from Mr. Panh's search for a single picture that could adequately represent the Cambodian genocide in his eyes. It was—and one senses that he knew this from the beginning—a futile quest.
"What interested me the most in this whole business was the journey I made to awaken memory and mourning," Mr. Panh says. "I was interested in this question of how one reconstitutes one's memories." After months spent poring over images of Cambodia from the 1970s—all that still existed was propaganda film shot by the Khmer Rouge, some of which is included in the documentary—a disillusioned Mr. Panh decided to go back to his childhood home in Phnom Penh, which he had been forced to leave at age 13.
"It was the first time I'd been back, and our house had been transformed into a bordello with prostitutes plying their trade," he says. "It was heartbreaking." After this traumatic experience, Mr. Panh built a small-scale model of his house as he remembered it when he lived there. Wanting to get a better idea of the dimensions of his model, Mr. Panh asked a young French-Cambodian sculptor, Sarith Mang, to make him a little clay figurine to place alongside it.
"When I saw what effect it had, I decided to start my project over using these clay figurines," Mr. Panh says. "What I saw made me think of Chagall's drawings or Picasso's sculptures which evoke a childhood kind of innocence for me. There's something very pure about these little figures—primitive but also contemplative." The static figures appear amid a variety of dioramas made out of cardboard, bits of wood, plastic and iron wire. For the paddy fields, Mr. Panh's design team cultivated real rice-plant cuttings.
As well as summoning the horrors of genocide, Mr. Panh's film evokes his carefree childhood when he would collect film scraps and watch them using a box and a small light. These memories and others were the vital stuff that kept Mr. Panh from losing his will to live in the Khmer Rouge's brutal work camps. "To hang on you must hide within yourself a strength, a memory, an idea that no one can take from you," he says in the film. "For if a picture can be stolen, a thought cannot."
One of the film's recurring images—indeed, how it begins and ends—is of the stirring, relentless sea. In my naïveté I imagined this image was one that Mr. Panh had used to symbolize the washing away of pain and distress.
In fact, it was quite the opposite. "It's more like having a wave of disappointment wash over you," he says. "Sometimes you founder because you feel like you are drowning beneath the wave and all you can do is come up gasping for air. The only thing you can do to survive is to learn how to deal with the pain."
It is for this reason, above all others, that Mr. Panh continues to trace his singular path as a filmmaker.
"The Missing Picture" comes out in the U.S. on March 19.