Rithy Panh Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Rithy Panh Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Rithy Panh Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

When you screen a film like ‘The Missing Picture,’ it is not like watching TV. Watching TV is very solitary. When you watch cinema, you watch it together, and you talk about it after the screening.

Rithy Panh

‘The Missing Picture’ came together slowly, after much provocation and by refusing different forms, until I finally found the right form.

Rithy Panh

To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can’t write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content.

Rithy Panh

Art is giving to what you create a soul.

Rithy Panh

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

Rithy Panh

Evil has always been there; it’s always a part of us. Evil is no big surprise. But what about the people who gave freely, who stood up for human dignity? Even in the most extreme and terrible situations, these acts of dignity existed. And for me, that is the banality of good.

Rithy Panh

When I make a film, I don’t watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away… I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I’ll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.

Rithy Panh

Cannes or Oscars is not only to bring happiness and recognition – they protect people like me. The world knows who you are. You can work. You can express. You can help other people. It’s not only the star system. It’s a symbol of freedom.

Rithy Panh

The most beautiful thing in Cambodia isn’t the country – it’s the Cambodian people.

Rithy Panh

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

Rithy Panh

With ‘The Missing Picture,’ we’d shot for a year and a half already when this idea of the clay figurine, the life that comes from the earth, came to me, and I changed everything.

Rithy Panh

I didn’t survive because I was stronger than others. I survived because my family and friends helped me to survive. They took my place. My job is to give them back their dignity, tell their story, and say their names.

Rithy Panh

‘The Missing Picture’ is about my story and my parents. Before this film, I never said ‘I’ in a film, so it is very personal.

Rithy Panh

I think that, as a filmmaker, you’re always making the same film, regardless of how many different stories you tell. This is the case for me, whether I’m making documentaries or fiction films.

Rithy Panh

Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.

Rithy Panh

We need a peaceful, modern Cambodia. We need to achieve that. It’s not easy.

Rithy Panh

Totalitarians always want to kill culture. But imagine life without football, Faulkner, or Bob Dylan. It’s not life.

Rithy Panh

When we pray to Buddha, we are not praying to a piece of stone, an image of Buddha, but we pray to the soul of Buddha behind the piece of stone. The souls of the people who are dead now are still with us.

Rithy Panh

For the young generation, when they see that there is a film director from Cambodia to go on to be nominated, for them, a lot can change. I don’t know another way to restore our identity if it’s not art.

Rithy Panh

People of my generation did not like very much to tell what we lived through during the Khmer Rouge regime.

Rithy Panh

Filming, for me, is a way of approaching, little by little – of getting closer and closer to my subject. And that subject itself can transform, or it can remain the same.

Rithy Panh

‘S21’ was a film about corporeal memory and how the same gestures repeated many times years earlier can be reawakened.

Rithy Panh

I’m not someone who has to make a film at any cost. I have to find the right way to make it or not at all.

Rithy Panh

Of course, when you’re making a documentary, you don’t have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room.

Rithy Panh

When the Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh, the first thing they did was to evacuate the population. Then they took over. The point of a revolution is to bring justice to the people, so even if you don’t have proof of sabotage, you manufacture it.

Rithy Panh

We must be capable of writing our own history.

Rithy Panh

Every day, do small gestures of generosity! It does not mean go to Cambodia. Do it at home. If you do nothing at home, evil becomes normal.

Rithy Panh

I have only one life, and I can’t do all. If I do one thing well, I’m happy.

Rithy Panh

There is no book-learning culture in Cambodia. People do not read. The children do not read in school. Educators must come up with a policy that meets the great need for knowledge: using modern audiovisual methods that the young can connect with.

Rithy Panh

We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz.

Rithy Panh

It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future.

Rithy Panh

As children, we did not have toys. We invented characters and animals; we invented stories.

Rithy Panh

In all of my films, there is a desire to testify, to interrogate the past.

Rithy Panh

Cambodia is not only a country of war, but also a country of culture. It’s in our DNA.

Rithy Panh

A country cannot develop without a strong identity.

Rithy Panh

I love archival films very much. I spent thousands of hours watching archive footage. Every time I see it, I see something. Sometimes I think I know this footage, but two years later, I see it again, and I see something new.

Rithy Panh

I left Cambodia when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t really escape, but I needed to go away.

Rithy Panh

Clay is a very interesting and fundamental material: it’s earth, it’s water, and – with fire – it takes on form and life.

Rithy Panh

I never want to be a film director – I want to be a teacher.

Rithy Panh

What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch ‘S21,’ it’s a form; ‘Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell‘ is a different proposal.

Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh Quotes

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