To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can't write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content.

Rithy Panh

Clay is a very interesting and fundamental material: it's earth, it's water, and - with fire - it takes on form and life.

Rithy Panh

The most beautiful thing in Cambodia isn't the country - it's the Cambodian people.

Rithy Panh

It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future.

Rithy Panh

Evil has always been there; it's always a part of us. Evil is no big surprise. But what about the people who gave freely, who stood up for human dignity? Even in the most extreme and terrible situations, these acts of dignity existed. And for me, that is the banality of good.

Rithy Panh

In this era of digital special effects, I think it's good to work with our hands and our hearts, to use water and clay, to dry it in the air from the sun. This brings you back to the element of life.

Rithy Panh

Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.

Rithy Panh

Of course, when you're making a documentary, you don't have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room.

Rithy Panh

When you screen a film like 'The Missing Picture,' it is not like watching TV. Watching TV is very solitary. When you watch cinema, you watch it together, and you talk about it after the screening.

Rithy Panh

The Khmer Rouge can't destroy me. I still have my imagination and am capable of making films. I am not locked up.

Rithy Panh

Art is freedom. If you defend art, you defend freedom.

Rithy Panh

When we pray to Buddha, we are not praying to a piece of stone, an image of Buddha, but we pray to the soul of Buddha behind the piece of stone. The souls of the people who are dead now are still with us.

Rithy Panh

We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz.

Rithy Panh

What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch 'S21,' it's a form; 'Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell' is a different proposal.

Rithy Panh

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

Rithy Panh

With 'The Missing Picture,' we'd shot for a year and a half already when this idea of the clay figurine, the life that comes from the earth, came to me, and I changed everything.

Rithy Panh

I love archival films very much. I spent thousands of hours watching archive footage. Every time I see it, I see something. Sometimes I think I know this footage, but two years later, I see it again, and I see something new.

Rithy Panh

The Khmer Rouge tried to delete everything. They tried to erase our past, our personality, our land, our sentiment. What we tried to do in 'The Missing Picture' was to reconstruct our identity, to bring it back to the people through cinema.

Rithy Panh

'The Missing Picture' came together slowly, after much provocation and by refusing different forms, until I finally found the right form.

Rithy Panh

If you can keep something very personal, like a song, like a color, like a story, deep in your heart, then nobody can destroy that. Nobody can destroy your imagination; nobody can destroy your love.

Rithy Panh

Evil has always been here since the world began. Good is what is difficult. It is a work of every day.

Rithy Panh