Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

November 6–9, 2025

BAMPFA presents a six-film retrospective of the work of the award-winning Cambodian French filmmaker Rithy Panh. This series dives deep into Panh’s oeuvre to showcase his strikingly brilliant essay films, which blend personal history, archival footage, and even dioramas and animation to investigate national history, cultural memory, and the human capacity to both inflict atrocity and survive it.

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  • Rithy Panh: Rice People, 1994

  • Rithy Panh: Meeting with Pol Pot, 2024

  • Rithy Panh: The Missing Picture, 2013

  • Rithy Panh: The Burnt Theatre, 2005

  • Rithy Panh: One Evening After the War, 1998

  • Rithy Panh: Everything Will Be OK, 2022

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Rice People

    Rithy Panh
    Cambodia, France, 1994
    Thursday, November 6 3:30 PM
    Introduced by Sylvia Tiwon

    Rithy Panh’s debut narrative feature, finished only a few years after Cambodia’s decade-long post–Khmer Rouge civil war, was the country’s first-ever submission to the foreign-language category at the Oscars.

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  • The Missing Picture

    Rithy Panh
    Cambodia, France, 2013
    Friday, November 7 2:30 PM
    Introduced by Michael Mascuch

    Rithy Panh’s revelatory look at his childhood experiences surviving the Khmer Rouge won the 2013 Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Clay figures, archival footage, and spoken words weave a stunningly vivid picture of the filmmaker’s and Cambodia’s past. 

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  • Meeting with Pol Pot

    Rithy Panh
    Cambodia, France, Taiwan, Qatar, Turkey, 2024
    Friday, November 7 7 PM
    Introduced by Penny Edwards

    Three French journalists visit Cambodia in 1978 and discover the deadly gap between what is shown, what is hidden, and what they are “permitted” to document. “A hauntingly timeless depiction of power and its mechanisms” (Variety).

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  • The Burnt Theatre

    Rithy Panh
    Cambodia, France, 2005
    Saturday, November 8 3:30 PM

    Cambodia’s once-grand, now-abandoned former National Theatre is the site of Rithy Panh’s spellbinding investigation of how to rebuild one’s country when culture is nearly forgotten and capitalism all-powerful. Chosen for the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

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  • One Evening After the War

    Rithy Panh
    France, Cambodia, 1998
    Saturday, November 8 7 PM
    Introduced by Penny Edwards

    Set in 1992, after two decades of war finally ended in Cambodia, this atmospheric urban noir/doomed romance follows a demobilized soldier and a dance-hall girl as they drift through a Phnom Penh of neon and dust, still haunted by death. 

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  • Everything Will Be OK

    Rithy Panh
    Cambodia, France, 2022
    Sunday, November 9 1:30 PM

    A dystopian, Animal Farm–like world created out of clay figurines provides an ingenious backdrop to Rithy Panh’s intellectually barnstorming look at twentieth-century brutality. History lesson, archival footage masterclass, folk-art animation, and science fiction narrative in one, inspired by Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, Umberto Eco, Mao, 2001, and more.

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