The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul

Rithy Panh, a survivor of Cambodia’s civil war and the Khmer Rouge regime, has earned a world-wide reputation for his innovative work in both fiction and documentary film. The Cinema of Rithy Panh begins with a timeline weaving Panh’s life and career with Cambodia’s tumultuous history. Bringing together a wide range of renowned interdisciplinary scholars, the book explores the scope of Panh’s career, including well-known films such as The Missing Picture and S-21 as well as less frequently studied works. Their approaches deepen our understanding of Panh as a filmmaker dealing with personal tragedy and memory, but also push beyond such intimate frameworks in order to situate Panh’s work within broader discussions of globalization, justice, imperialism, diaspora, labor, gender, and aesthetics. Panh approaches these themes with deep ethical sensitivity and artistic creativity, constructing dynamic and sensuous images that explore the imbrication of history and memory, the individual and the collective,and that suggest, as Panh has, that ‘everything has a soul.