The Missing Picture

The Missing Picture is a haunting and undeniably bold documentary about the Cambodia genocide. The film depicts the teenage years of director RithyPanh, when his family suffered horribly beneath Pol Pot's dictatorial regime. The picture, however, is "missing". The only filmed images that exist from those years are Khmer Rouge propaganda, so Panh uses clay figures as stand-ins for himself, and also many Cambodians who would suffer atrocities at the Khmer Rouge's hands. As a harrowing memoir of an oppressed people and a cinema experiment in representation, The Missing Picture is worthy of all its accolades, both past and forthcoming.