Exile
(Exil)

How can you film exile? How can you film what no longer exists? Ritty Panh replies by composing a theatre of images, where memory-images and archive images document the lost world that was emptied of its inhabitants and annihilated by the Khmer dictatorship. Exile takes the form of a darkroom where ghostly memories appear and disappear like living – and sometimes dreamlike – pictures of solitude, of a melody, of a mother’s gentleness. The permanence of the images confronts those who desired the coming of a new man but obtained nothing more than a dead man. “If exile cannot look childhood in the face”, it can at least try to do so. In the darkroom, a place of indictment. Catherine Hass