Ravi Kishore "The missing picture" is a novel form of documentary cinema. The theme is the Khmer rouge regime in Cambodia. This heartbreaking story is told using clay figurines in sets built from wood, leaves, clay and water. Suddenly you'll be inside villages in rain forests witnessing human inflicted hunger, death, rot and suffering. It's a story of how a twelve year old kid looses his father, mother, sister and brother to ideology, flags, slogans and submissiveness of human thought.This film captures his pain with far greater purity because the viewer's mind knows that Clay figures are not actors, actors act (they lie). The figurines are real, they are suffering clad in black clothes, armed with a wooden spoon. The figurine portray the resistance in those unfortunate souls by the same mode - a tiny gesture and silence.Camera-work for such miniature sets is a display of pure innovation and diligence on the creator's part. The background score is perfect, you can hear the sounds of the forest, tilling of the earth or playing of children in the distance. The narration has no room for sensationalism, the pain, sarcasm and anger is heartfelt and the story is personal.Every viewer owes it to those lost lives to never let the tragedy happen again.

Baceseras The Khmer Rouge tried to leave no traces of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79). It could be a crime for anyone outside the Party to have pencil and paper, not to mention camera or tape recorder. Scarcely any images got out.Rithy Panh was thirteen when his family was rounded up. along with the other residents of Phnom Penh, and sent to "re-education" camps and then five years of starvation and rural labor. Now as a survivor looking back at those years, he uses simple clay figures to represent the people who died unrecorded. He juxtaposes them with scraps of propaganda films and other footage, and with manufactured landscapes, while narrating a major 20th century horror story that's also a personal and national tragedy.The film takes all kinds of aesthetic risks: the images are complexly beautiful, but they dare to seem simplistic or naïve, or to skirt "bad taste." The simplicity is more than justified though, as The Missing Picture does recapture a lost time, the artistic triumph inseparable from the human triumph.

l_rawjalaurence Several reviewers have commented on the basic themes of Rithy Panh's documentary; what is perhaps more interesting is the way in which the title operates on two levels. First, Panh's film aims to fill in "the missing picture" of life in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime. For most of the time, the only visual material available on this regime was propaganda films depicting an idealized world of workers happily contributing to the new country Kampuchea's collective sense of well- being. Through a mixture of clay figures and archive footage, Panh proves the opposite; most citizens had to get used to a combination of perpetual hunger and enforced labor. The clay figures are an important element of this film, suggesting that human beings can be rendered malleable in any way their makers/ captors choose. At another level, the film tries to recreate the "missing picture" of Panh's past; at the age of fifty, he looks back at his childhood in the pre-Pol Pot era, a world of color and variety that was ruthlessly swept away, as the people were forced to wear black and work inhumanly long hours in the rice- fields. The experience left an indelible mark on Panh's character, as he lost most of his family due to starvation, without being able to do a thing about it. Even now he feels guilty for his inaction. Living under a tyrannous regime was bad enough, but what was much worse for Panh was the way in which that regime rendered him powerless, as well as depriving his life of the possibilities - both personal as well as professional - that could have been available in the pre-Pol Pot era. The "missing picture" cannot be recreated, however hard he tries. The film ends on a somber note, as Panh reminds us how much the souls of the millions who died during the Pol Pot regime still haunt those who survived. While efforts have been made to erase the past (a lake has been built over one of the mass graves), he still feels somehow united with the dead rather than the living - an indication, perhaps, of the emotional and physical consequences of tyranny. While THE MISSING PICTURE offers a country-specific interpretation of the past, its message should be heeded by everyone about the consequences of living under an absolutist government.

Lee Eisenberg Above all else, Rithy Panh's Oscar-nominated documentary "L'image manquante" ("The Missing Picture" in English) is a testament to the determination of the human spirit. He uses clay figures to tell the story of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields in Cambodia, recounting how the group's attempts to rid Cambodia of anything regarded as western or educated caused one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century.Another thing that it made me think is a similar phenomenon that we see today. Much like how the Khmer Rouge sought to eradicate all intellectualism and declared Year Zero, the Tea Party and its supporters in politics rant against "elitism", saying that they want to make America like it's "supposed to be". How soon before these people launch their own Khmer Rouge-style social engineering program? Either way, it's a great documentary. You should definitely see it.