Phnom Penh
After almost two decades spent meticulously documenting - and encouraging - Cambodia's return to normalcy after Pol Pot's genocidal years, director Rithy Panh finally may have finished with the Khmer Rouge. This month, he'll focus on another troubling, if less horrific, period in his country's modern history: the days of French colonial rule.
'Now everyone wants to talk about the Khmer Rouge,' Panh says. 'Everyone wants to tell that story. But we did that years ago. The question is: why does everyone want to tell that story now?'
Panh is at the Bophana Audio Visual Research Centre, an archive he opened in Phnom Penh last year with the aim of retrieving Cambodia's memory. Next month, he'll begin directing his first feature in Cambodia, a period piece based on the novel A Stopping Against the Pacific by Marguerite Duras.
Like The Lover - another Duras novel that was adapted for the screen (starring Tony Leung Ka-fai) - the semi-autobiographical story focuses on an unhinged French family struggling to stay afloat in Indochina in the late 1940s. French actress Isabelle Huppert will star as a desperate, mentally unstable mother, while Gaspard Ulliel will play her stubbornly licentious son.
'The novel tells a part of our history,' says Panh. 'It takes place during colonial times, so I want to know: what were people like then? What did they think?'
Instead of a shoestring budget, as Panh usually has, he'll have a few million euros to spend, as well as a script by Michel Fessler, the French screenwriter behind the surprise 2005 hit March of the Penguins.
