The Rainbow Unicorn

“The missing pictures”

   « The missing picture » was produced by Rithy Panh and appeared in 2015. It's a movie about the events taking place between 17 April 1975 and 7 January 1979. The Kmer Rouge decided to separate the cambodgian people in two parts : « The ancient people », which is heathly and pure and « The new people », which is native to the cities and imperialist and which must be purified, that a big director named Pol Pot, at the head of the Kmer Rouge. Rithy Panh talked about a « genocide », but it's not totally true, because a genocide is when a group thinks an other group of people doesn't deserve to live, so they kill them and erase all traces of their existence and their memories for example. Here, it's not really a genocide because people who killed Cambodians from « new people » where also Cambodian. In some way, it's a self-genocide. Rithy Panh left these horrible events an he thinks this terrible story was too fast forgotten, so he decided to show us « the missing picture », which he didn't find, by building it with many little figurines made of clay, and some archive videos to make a film.

   I loved this movie because the author's intentions are touching, and the use of figurines to recreate memories, good or bad, is very explicit to understand the story. Even if there are somewhat flat moments from time to time, I think it is very important to know the horrible events that took place in Cambodia to show the human stupidity and not to make it happen again, and Rithy Panh has found a good way to tell us.