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Rithy Panh continues his exploration of the Khmer Rouge atrocities through an approach that lingers between the art-house film and the documentary, in a film that was Cambodia’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 91st Academy Awards.

Graves Without A Name is screening at Margaret Mead Film Festival

The presentation is split in three different types of sequences. The first depicts Cambodian (burying) rituals, from a number of people (including the director himself) who do not even know where their relatives and loved ones died or even if they were buried.

The second, and the most impactful, consists of testimonies from a number of people who have experienced the Khmer Rouge regime first-hand. Their narration paints one of the blackest pictures in the history of humanity, with the events including “scenes” of death from hunger, rape, militia overhearing people’s houses and informing the authorities of...

“Bad karma doesn’t wait for the next life,” states a trauma-raddled Khmer Rouge survivor toward the end of Rithy Panh’s “Graves Without a Name.” He says it in a tone of numb assurance, confident but also past caring: He may wish ill on those who murdered, raped and tormented his people 40 years ago, but with no chance of remedy for his own grief, he’ll leave it in the hands of the universe. A more intimate follow-up to Panh’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Missing Picture,” this meditative piece likewise seeks to move past devastation and into a manner of still-painful peace.

Following the director himself on a study of indigenous ritual and mythos in search of his slain family’s unknown resting places, it’s a less formally rigorous work than “The Missing Picture,” perhaps by design: Sudden surges of emotion seem to guide its shuffling of symbols,...

Those who have already read L'amant (The Lover) knows why it's extremely hard to adapt a novel of French novelist Marguerite Duras into a film. Yours truly hasn't seen the film The Lover. However, as for this film, all I can tell you is that it bores you to death because of its slow pace and its badly written dialogues. All in all, the excellent cinematography can't help the film.

In the French Indochina (Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos) of the 1930s, a widow (Isabelle Hupert) invested her savings in a rice field in Cambodia. However, she feels that she's got ripped off by the colonial authorities. In fact, she has difficulty to pay back the mortgage on her land and it's always flooded by typhoons of the South China Sea. This is why the widow plans to build a dam to make profits. However, as she tries to improve her situation,...