The Cambodian auteur returned to some of the methods of his 2014 Oscar nominee 'The Missing Picture' to craft a searching essay film inspired by various upheavals around the world, including the coronavirus pandemic, political violence in Myanmar and the Jan. 6 riot in the U.S.
, which premiered in Berlin, found him casting his net wider, interrogating the very nature of evil through the deployment of harrowing images of Hiroshima, Auschwitz and elsewhere.
Since this is such a unique film, I’m curious to hear how you summarize or describe it to people when you’re telling them about it for the first time. So many things in the news have this strange half-real, half-nightmare feeling. During the lockdown, people went onto their smart phones and social media and into the virtual world even deeper. In Myanmar, near my home in Cambodia, we saw the dictatorship’s terrible crackdown. In the United States, such a rich, powerful, supposed-to-be stable country, we were of course hoping Donald Trump will lose, but then when he did, people in Buffalo skins attacked the capital.
Well, I didn’t really decide. The pace of life and the lockdown decided for me. These were things I could work with. But I like very much working with figurines, and I said to myself years ago that I wanted to make three films this way. I like to explore their possibilities. But I didn’t have a subject or genuine situation that fit with this form back then. So with the pandemic, I said, “Okay, we can make a second one now, and the figurines can have a life.
And how do you go about structuring a film like this? It seems clear that you don’t just sit down and write the script start to finish. I imagine it’s a more fluid process?
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