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Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh is an unconventional book about an unconventional filmmaker. Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found refuge in France where he discovered in film a language that allowed him to tell what happened to the two million souls who suffered hunger, overwork, disease, and death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. His innovative cinema is made with people, not about them-even those guilty of crimes against humanity. Whether he is directing Isabelle Huppert in The Sea Wall , following laborers digging trenches, or interrogating the infamous director of S-21 prison, aesthetics and ethics inform all he does. With remarkable access to the director and his work, Deirdre Boyle introduces readers to Panh's groundbreaking approach to perpetrator cinema and dazzling critique of colonialism, globalization, and the refugee crisis. Ferryman of Memories reveals the art of one of the masters of world cinema today, focusing on nineteen of his award-winning films, including Rice People, The Land of Wandering Souls, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and The Missing Picture.

Franco-Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has two new works titled Exil (Exile). His 2016 poetic film is a sepia-toned meditation on time, memory, revolution, and resistance that materializes dreams, fantasies, and nightmares with the mundane realities of his childhood survival of genocide. This survival is juxtaposed with a complex, disembodied narration on being-in-exile. Inspired by this original film, Panh's 2017 immersive multimedia installation embraces the current global refugee crisis, combining photographs, archival film footage, selected objects, and an audio track all designed to elicit understanding and compassion for people fleeing war, oppression, and catastrophe. Both film and installation are intellectually rigorous and aesthetically compelling, and both share visual motifs, but each stakes out a different perspective—the former offers an introspective vision of one man's experience of exile while the latter documents the plight of millions of stateless people. Together they represent the latest achievements of a major artist who is driven to remember and to affirm his own humanity and the humanity of Others.

[...]in this scene, \"his gestures, the memory of his body, came flooding back. Because someone trained him to do this. The legacy of Janet, who was one of Freud's teachers, was crowded out by psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the repression of unacceptable wishes.14 It would take until the 1970s for Janet's ideas to be revived, contributing to a better understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the Vietnam War.15 Janet's ideas are particularly helpful when considering how dissociation of traumatic memories may render them virtually inaccessible through language until they can be translated into the symbolic language necessary for linguistic retrieval and thus brought into consciousness. \"25 As cultural critic Andreas Huyssen notes, we in the West are experiencing anxiety over forgetting, thanks to globalization, mass media, and a hypertrophy of emerging-and rapidly obsolescing-technologies that have aroused wide-scale cultural fear of oblivion as the relationships between past, present, and future are being transformed.26 Yet our anxiety is nothing compared with that of Rithy Panh, whose country still suffers from an official silence imposed about the past, disconnected from memories that hold a nation hostage. Were it not for bombing runs over Cambodia during the Vietnam War, one can argue that political instability, civil war, and the scourge of the Pol Pot regime might never have come to this devastating conclusion.

As a refugee in France fleeing the Cambodian genocide, Rithy Panh saw Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, 1954) in a film club in Grenoble when he was eighteen. It revealed to the traumatized teenager that what he had experienced under the Khmer Rouge had happened before under the Nazis. The film’s ending includes a thinly veiled allusion to France’s mistreatment of Algerians then in revolt against the French colonial order. A few years later, as a film student in Paris, Panh discovered Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die, 1952), an anticolonialist film by

The first book I read after viewing S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine was David Chandler’s Voices of S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. I was reluctant to make S-21 my first stop on dark tourism’s checklist of things to do in Cambodia.¹ But my trip to Cambodia would not be complete without a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum—the name given today to S-21—and to Choeung Ek, the killing fields located on the outskirts of the city. My tuk-tuk driver Mr. Lucky was, as always, accommodating, patiently waiting for me at each location

The historian Hayden White suggests that only those who have experienced “unbelievable” events can render them believable. As a survivor of Democratic Kampuchea, Panh brings to his autobiographical project something no outside observer possesses, a capacity for empathy and understanding born out of the need to survive atrocity with one’s humanity intact. Each of his autobiographical films is dramatically different in form from the others; each offers a different perspective on time, space, place, memory, and loss. The Missing Picture shuttles between the time of childhood spent happily with a loving family before the fall of Phnom Penh and the

S-21 was the code name for the secret prison created in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge to incarcerate, interrogate, torture, and execute top figures of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) who were suspected of being traitors. Its purpose expanded to eliminate the old guard, which included army officers, civil servants, aristocrats, and “new people” who lived in cities suspected of remaining loyal to the old regime. The first victims were the mentally ill and physically impaired. Then the religious, homosexuals, and intellectuals were all targeted to be “smashed.” Over four years, more and more people were arrested and brought

Although many viewers are familiar with Panh’s documentaries about the Khmer Rouge genocide, far fewer are acquainted with the films that address the challenges survivors of the Pol Pot years have faced when trying to build a new life after five years of civil war, four years of Khmer Rouge brutality, and ten years of occupation by the Vietnamese. Panh’s first documentary film, Site 2 (1989), focused on the difficulties endured by survivors like Yim Om, who for de cades had lived in one refugee camp after another, somehow managing to preserve dignity and hope in a better future for