Review: The Missing Picture

City Paper grade: B+

Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh has spent his career making films about the evils of the Khmer Rouge, but The Missing Picture is both his most personal and most unorthodox exploration of the murderous regime. Panh was 13 years old when Pol Pot took power in 1975, and was sent with his family to toil in a series of re-education and labor camps. The only images that exist of these horrific events being propaganda films shot by the Khmer Rouge itself, Panh aims to fill in the gaps in the cinematic historical record with his own memories. He uses crudely carved clay figurines set in playful dioramas to tell the harrowing story, and while there would seem to be a disconnect between the sobering reality and this childlike approach, the results are surprisingly effective and moving. The camps were places where every thought was strictly mandated and molded, so that imagination, fantasy and storytelling became, in Panh’s words, “acts of resistance.” These rough-hewn surrogates, then, serve a purpose similar to Panh’s mother conjuring a more fitting funeral for his father, whose body was unceremoniously dumped into a mass grave — they craft an alternative reality that quietly rebels against the forcibly imposed oppression. The film stands as an interesting companion piece to last year’s The Act of Killing, in which Joshua Oppenheimer asked Indonesian death-squad executioners to tell their side of the story through often outlandish genre films. The Missing Piece turns the tables, giving voices to the victimized through deeply personal creations that paint a more vivid picture than the “documentary” record ever could.