FROM LEFT: Doha Film Institute CEO Fatma Al Remaihi, DFI Director Film Fund and Programs Hanaa Issa, Film director Rithy Pahn and Doha Film Institute Artistic Adviser Elia Suleiman ahead of the Master Screening of "Missing Picture" on day three of Qumra.
Cambodian-French filmmaker and Qumra Master Rithy Panh has advised emerging filmmakers in Qatar to document their heritage to preserve history.
“This place has changed a lot in the past 20 years. It is going very fast. But if you do not document your story (your past and heritage), you will have no history,” he told audiences, taking them on a sublime journey into his own tryst with filmmaking.
Panh, the director of The Missing Picture (Cambodia, France/2013), nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, is acclaimed for his compelling documentaries that probe into the dark annals of Cambodia’s history under the Khmer Rouge.
For Panh, each film has been intense excursions into his own life and soul. But for a filmmaker who sought catharsis in documenting the evil that men did, he believes that ‘cinema cannot heal anything. Cinema cannot change life or the world but it gives you the possibility that you can change something. That is why cinema is relevant.”
He has opened the Bophana Centre in Phnom Penh to help rebuild the Cambodian film industry. It had a number of young Cambodians working in First They Killed My Father, Angelina Jolie’s recent film adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir, with Bophana Productions as co-producer. “I don’t ask my students to make films of the genocide,” says Panh. “We train them and give possibility to making images and sounds.”
