Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh was born in Phnom Penh in 1964 and he graduated from IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, Paris). After his family was forced from Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and later died in a refugee camp, Rithy Panh fled to Thailand in 1979. He then ended up in Paris, where he became interested in film, and attended film school. Life under the Khmer Rouge and the legacy of that regime became the major themes of his films. Panh made his debut in 1989 with Site 2, and in the years that followed made a range of documentaries about life in Cambodia, eventually returning to the country of his birth. Since then, he has been a key figure in the documentary industry in Cambodia, and not only because of internationally recognised films such S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011). Panh is also the founder and director of the Bophana: Audiovisual Resource Center in Cambodia, which aims to preserve the history of Cambodian film and photography.
Panh has also produced films such as Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon's Red Wedding, a documentary supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund which in 2012 won the IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary, and which also deals with the legacy of Pol Pot's regime. Rithy Panh's latest film, l'Image Manquante, had its première in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes film festival.

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