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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.

At the outset, it is important to state that Ladies' Tailor is not a great film. The symbolism is often forced, the pace slow, the characters stock. Indeed, [Leonid Gorovets] is indebted as much to the socialist realist films of his youth -- with their clear-cut villains and heroes -- as he is to the Western film world in which Ladies' Tailor is principally marketed. (The Russian film industry virtually collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. And as the free market took over distribution, foreign blockbusters monopolized ex-Soviet screens.) This film, however, invites careful scrutiny not for its aesthetic value but for the picture it creates of a specifically Soviet Jewry. Accustomed as we are to images of the Holocaust, Western viewers will approach this film with assumptions regarding the horrific end of European Jewish life. By emphasizing the unique 'never again' quality of the Holocaust, however, we may fail to place it within a specific historical and geographic context. Gorovets, whose Jewish family obviously survived the 'final solution' on Soviet soil, does just this. Ladies' Tailor evokes the more distant past of Russian or, more specifically, Ukrainian Jewry. It then compares the fate of Jews to that of other Soviet citizens, and it shows the Nazi horrors to be only one of the destructive forces to overrun Kiev in the past 70 years. Like Vasilii Grossman's more sophisticated but still socialist realist-influenced treatment of the period in the novel Life and Fate, Ladies' Tailor places equal blame for the horrors of this century on Stalin as on Hitler. Gorovets thus has a distinctly glasnost-era perspective on his country's fate. The janitor [David, Anton] informs the newcomers gruffly: 'You've come too early. Tomorrow they'll be off to their Palestine.' The janitor may not have known that traditional Jews often went to Palestine to be buried and to await there the coming of the promised messiah, but Gorovets surely must. [Isaac Babel]'s family prepares for departure to some brighter, super-worldly place, not only from this cruel land. The early arrival of new inhabitants turns the apartment into a kind of no-man's land, where human time is transitional and no one feels fully at home. But the incoming inhabitants' temporary homelessness only reinforces the permanent visitor-status of the Jews in Russia and Ukraine. Departure for them signifies death ('they'll be off to their Palestine'), but it also recalls previous periods of wandering that prove rather than deny the Jews' historical vitality. At one point Isaac compares this hasty departure to another that led, albeit after 40 years, to the promised land. [Sonia] offers to sew him a cover for his suitcase. He answers: 'When Moses led the Jews through the desert, they had neither suitcases nor covers.' The picture is not all bleak. We know that the Jews left behind two important items, besides the graves of David and Isaac's wife. In the courtyard by their home, Isaac, Sonia, Ira, the baby, and [Masha] gather with the new family before leaving on their march. Isaac turns tenderly to the woman for whom he prepared a suit in the wee hours of the morning. 'I'll never see you again.' Then, humorously realizing the metaphor: 'I lost my glasses during the night.' 'You won't be able to work without your glasses,' she responds, not realizing, as we might, that he has left behind not only his livelihood but his whole humane way of seeing the world. He will not need them now, but she, who will be living in his abandoned home, can find the glasses and put them on. In addition, Sonia immediately announces: 'I've lost my head, I forgot the sewing machine. I could earn some money with it.' We know, as she refuses to admit, that there will be no money to earn in the pit of Babi Yar. Regardless, the machine, like the glasses, is left behind for the new family to learn to use. Having received the light and warmth of Isaac, perhaps they now can piece together the remnants of their own mutilated world.

This vignette from theapophthegmata patrum(sayings and stories attributed to pioneers of Egyptian desert monasticism) presents two very different attitudes toward wandering monks in the late fourth or early fifth century, and introduces questions that are central to our entire study. It assumes that monks would likely cause a scandal if seen repeatedly(palin)moving or changing residence: Why? Who would be scandalized by such behavior? Does the labelakathistoi—the “unsettled,” “restless,” or perhaps “unstable” ones—imply other behavior that caused alarm? If so, what sort of behavior? At the same time, why might other people consider such