Eye on the Oscars: The Innovators -- 'The Missing Picture' – Cambodia

Eye on the Oscars: The Innovators

Variety

'The Missing Picture' – Cambodia

In its inaugural submission to the foreign-language Oscar category, Cambodia pulled off an upset, winning a nomination for Rithy Panh's “The Missing Picture.” Panh's family was among the victims of the Khmer Rouge, which sent intellectuals from the city to work on the farms in a social experiment. Many, including Panh's parents and other family members, died of illness, starvation and torture. With so many of that generation gone and archives destroyed, Panh re-created history using clay figurines. “I made the film because I want this story to belong to everyone,” Panh told Sight and Sound magazine. 

Variety's Justin Chang: “The result is a carefully aestheticized catalog of atrocities that, as lovingly shot by d.p. Prum Mesa and somewhat insistently scored by Marc Marder, generates its own strange, complicated line of ethical inquiry. Beautifully hand-carved and painted by sculptor Sarith Mang, the figurines look remarkably human with their sharply individualized features, their speechlessness and immobility underscoring the collective helplessness of a people subjected to methodical extermination.”