GRAVES WITHOUT A NAME DOCS D: Rithy Panh. France/Cambodia. 115 min. Sep 7, 6:45 pm, TBLB 2 Sep 9, 9 am, AGO Sep 16, 9:30 am, Scotiabank 13. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Grief can feel all-encompassing when one person dies, but what must it be like for survivors of genocide? Director Panh has explored the Khmer Rouge’s brutal regime in Cambodia throughout his career (including the Oscar-nominated 2013 doc The Missing Picture), and Graves Without A Name is an exceptionally moving and unique achievement.
This is an expansive view of grief told through small details and gestures. His camera lingers on mundane objects – eggs, grains of rice, rocks – symbolically used in rituals by survivors as they search for ghosts in the afterlife.
Interspersing first-person accounts with personal and poetic narration, repetition, transposed photos, probing close-ups and aerial slow pans, Panh shows how trauma and landscape are forever intertwined in Cambodia, and the ways survivors have imbued facets of everyday life with memories of lost loved ones.
Panh’s innovative, deceptively simple filmmaking renders the ghostly and immaterial as powerfully visceral.
