The French-schooled director's films focus on the aftermath of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. His works are from an authoritative viewpoint, because his family were expelled from Phnom Penh in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge. One after another, his father, mother, sisters and nephews died of starvation or exhaustion, as they were held in a remote labor camp in rural Cambodia.
Biography
Early life
Rithy was born in Phnom Penh. His father was a long time undersecretary at the Ministry of Education, a senator, a school teacher and inspector of primary schools.[2][3]
Eventually, he made his way to Paris, France. It was while he was attending vocational school to learn carpentry that he was handed a video camera during a party that he became interested in film-making.[5] He went on to graduate from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Institute for the Advanced Cinematographic Studies). He returned to Cambodia in 1990, while still using Paris as a home base.
Career as director
His first documentary feature film, Site 2, about a family of Cambodian refugees in a camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s, was awarded "Grand Prix du Documentaire" at the Festival of Amiens.
The 2000 documentary, The Land of the Wandering Souls, also told of a family's struggle, as well as showing a Cambodia entering the modern age, chronicling the hardships of workers digging a cross-country trench for Cambodia's first optical fiber cable.
His 2003 documentary, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, about the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng prison, reunited former prisoners, including the artist Vann Nath, and their former captors, for a chilling, confrontational review of Cambodia's violent history.
More post-Khmer Rouge events are documented in the 2005 drama, The Burnt Theatre, which focuses on a theater troupe that inhabits the burned-out remains of Phnom Penh's Suramet Theatre, which caught fire in 1994 but has never been rebuilt.
The 2011 movie "Gibier d'élevage" (in French, "The Catch" in English), is based on a 1957 novel by the Japanese Nobel Prize writer Kenzaburō Ōe about the villagers' behavior when a black US Airforce pilot's plane is shot down and crashes over Japan (Cambodia in the movie).
The 2012 documentary, Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, is about interviews with Kang Guek Eav, a former leader in the Khmer Rouge, also known as Duch, tried by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and sentenced to 30 years of prison, but appealing against the conviction. However, he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment after the appeal.
Rithy, along with director Ieu Pannakar, has developed the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with an aim towards preserving the country's film, photographic and audio history. The center's namesake is the subject of one of his early docudramas, Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, about a young woman who was tortured and killed at S-21 prison.[12]
Political views
In December 2023, alongside 50 other filmmakers, Rithy signed an open letter published in Libération demanding a ceasefire and an end to the killing of civilians amid the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, and for a humanitarian corridor into Gaza to be established for humanitarian aid, and the release of hostages.[13][14][15]
^Panh, Rithy; Bataille, Christophe (2014). The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields. ISBN978-1590516751.
