“There is nothing real in cinema”Interview with Rithy Panh – By Tilman Baumgärtel At this year´s film festival in Cannes, Rithy Panh received the Un Certain Regard award for his his film “The Missing Image”. This is the first time a film maker from Cambodia wins an award at the festival. In an interview that was conducted before the film was complete Rithy Panh talks about his documentary films and how they blend reality and fiction. His latest film is partly based on Rithy Panh´s autobiographic book “L'élimination”, that he wrote with script writer Christophe Bataille and has since been published in English as “The Elimination: A survivor of the Khmer Rouge confronts his past and the commandant of the killing fields”. ????: You are the best-known film maker from Cambodia. Does this mean that you have a special responsibility to represent your country in world cinema? Rithy Panh: Well, it could look like that. It is my life, you know, of me and my family and my country. I just have to do it. I do some documentaries, then I do a feature, then I do some documentaries again. With every film I shoot here, I preserve the Khmer heritage, starting with my very first film. Cinema to me is like rewinding memory, so that the present and future generations can remember the past and learn from it. The genocide led to a drastic eradication of memory in my country. We lost our identity and our dignity, and I want to bring them back through my films. I can’t make nice films with nice subjects and nice people, because my life was very different. I’ve been so close to death, and making films now is like a rebirth for me.????: In your films, you often seem to blur the boundaries between fiction and documentaries. Can you explain how you develop films like “The People of Angkor”, that is a documentary about the workers who restore the temples in Angkor Wat. But some scenes seem like they were staged. Rithy Panh: I do not make films about people, I make films with people. I share their lives, I do not tell a story about their lives. And I ask them, what do you want to show in the film?????: For example, in “The People of Angkor”, there is a scene, where a young boy talks to an Apsara, one of the heavenly dancers from Khmer mythology, that adorn the walls of the temples of Angkor Wat. How did that come about? Rithy Panh: I asked the boy: ´What do you want to do?´ And he said: ´I want to talk to the Apsara.´ ´Ok, go ahead.´ Reality and the people are the best scriptwriters in the world. You just have to have the curiosity to listen to them. The problem with documentary film begins, when you have an idea, and you want reality to fit your idea. What do you do, if reality is different from your idea? The best documentaries are the ones that you direct like a fiction film and the best fiction films are the ones that you direct like a documentary. There is nothing real in film making. Everything is subjective. You shoot here, not here, you edit, you put the first day of the shooting in the middle, the second day at the beginning. That is not reality. But if you listen to what people want, that´s ok. The morale of a film is not interesting. But the morale of shooting the film is very important.????: There is one scene in “The People of Angkor”, where the workers talk about a movie that is being shot in the area. There is the rumor that the film team is looking for an extra that will earn a lot of money if he lets himself get eaten by a tiger. I cannot believe that this conversation was a real event...
Rithy Panh: These conversations happened spontaneously. I cannot image such a story as the one with the tiger. They brought it up. When they are working, I cannot disturb them. When they have a 30 minute break, I can go. Sometimes, we got an extra 30 minutes. So I spend a lot of time watching them work. You take three days, and you do not know what you are doing. You watch, you wait, you watch, you wait. If they are done with their work, you can go, but you have to go very quickly. ????: How is your relationship with the workers? Rithy Panh: They don´t mind where I come from. I cannot do what they do. It is very very hard. When we were shooing “Land of Wandering Souls”, I tried to dig the trench for the cables. It was too hard. Why do people talk to you? You come from the city, you will leave in a few weeks – why should they trust you? Why should they talk to you and tell you their story? So, if they go in the rain, I go in the rain. When they get wet, I get wet. If they go to the river, I go to the river. And if they spend eight hours a day working in the very hot sun, I do not stay in the car with the air con on. If you go to your van and listen to music, they will not respect you, when they have a break. ?: How about “The Burnt Theatre”? Did you have a script for this film, or are the scenes improvised? Rithy Panh: Everything is improvised. I gave the actors a subject, and they came up with the scenes. The people in the film were the actual actors from the National Theatre. They were really living in the burned-out theater, as you can see in the film. ?: Talking about letting people tell their own stories, one of the most moving scenes in your film “S-21” is the scene with one of the former guards, who acts out in front of the camera how he used to treat the prisoners there? Did you tell him to do that? Rithy Panh: How can I tell him that? I do not know what life in the cell was like. This guy was a guard, but I don´t think he tortured people. He was just a guard, and he was very young at that time, maybe 14 or 15. The violence in this center was so bad, that 25 years later, he still cannot speak about what his job was and what he did there. We tried to talk, and he tried to tell me, but he just could not do it. I am not a journalist. There is no voice-over or explanation in my films, nothing like: “This is the guard, who...” So I need him to speak, but he could not speak. But I noticed that he kept gesturing while he tried to talk. So I told him: You can show us what you did, if you cannot talk about it. If you are an observer and if you spend time with him and go to his house many times, you might be able to find a solution for that, to help him express himself. When I told him, that he can move and show me what they would do, he was so eager to show us everything. After the shooting he had a very bad fever. It was like he had a major operation, and something had been taken out. It was like a confession. ????: Your new is about your family history under the Khmer Rouge, and you are using material from propaganda films of the Khmer Rouge. Can these sanitized pictures say something about the terrible circumstances under their rule? Rithy Panh: The images from the Khmer Rouge films are are not interesting in themselves. It is the people who made these images, who are interesting. That´s what is good about an archive like Bophana. To create images is not so interesting. Everybody can to this today with their smart phones. But if you work in an archive, you can meet the people who made the images and ask them: How did you work, why did you shoot that? ?: But is there any documentary truth to these pictures? Panh: I know that they took pictures of the executions in death camps such as S21, but we have never seen these images. There are no visual records of the genocide in Cambodia. Maybe they were destroyed. Maybe somebody put them in a box and dug a hole and put the box into the hole, before he left Phnom Penh on January 7th 1979. We don´t know. But if I had found the image of an execution, can I show it? I'm not sure about that. Maybe I don't want to find that image. The journey towards the image is more important than the image itself.