The Cambodian Student Society of Cal State Long Beach
will host the
Rithy Panh Film Festival on Oct 11-13 as follows:

Location: University Theatre (seats 400)

FRIDAY OCTOBER 11 ( for 3 hours)
7:00 p.m. “The Rice People” (35 mm; 125 minutes)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 (5 hours)
2 p.m. Site II (59 minutes; BETA PAL format)
3:30 p.m. : Bophana: (59 minutes; BETA PAL format)
5 pm: Land of Wandering Souls (99 minutes; BETA PAL
format)

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13 (7 hours)
2 p.m. The Rice People (125 minutes)
4:30 pm. Land of Wandering Souls (99 minutes)
6: 30 pm Bophana (59 minutes)
7:30 p.m. Site II (59 minutes)

Information about the four films/documentaries
follows:

1) LAND OF WANDERING SOULS
France /1999/99 min
Director – Rithy Panh
Producer – Cati Couteau
Director of Photography – Prum Mesar
Editors – Marie-Christine Rougerie, Isabelle Roudy
Screenwriters -Rithy Panh

This compassionate portrait of post-Khmer Rouge
Cambodia portrays workers digging a trench across that
country for a multinational company’s fiber optic
cable, earning pennies a day enabling a high-tech
communication system that will otherwise never touch
their lives. Though exhausted and uneducated, they are
hardly naïve: In one scene, the laborers are plainly
unimpressed by a patronizing company man’s
enthusiastic description of the “magic eyes and ears”
of the fiber optic cable they’ll never use. (One man
dryly observes that he can barely afford kerosene for
his lamp.) Then there is the haunting legacy of Pol
Pot’s Khmer Rouge. “They turned my generation into
ignorant masses-just animals,” one young man observes.
“The Khmer Rouge drove us mad.” Every scene
illuminates the dignity of a people recovering from a
war that left mines and human remains that are still
scattered across the countryside. The dangers posed by
the mines are obvious, but stray bones are disturbing
on another level-a pregnant wife believes that a ghost
is pursuing her. The predominant sounds in the film
are the thud of hoes striking the ground, the splashes
of children scavenging for fish and the rustling of
leaves as a mother shakes ants from a branch into a
pail. Despite poverty and betrayal, the resilience and
gentle common sense of the Cambodian people is
undiminished.

2) BOPHANA: A CAMBODIAN TRAGEDY
France / 1996 / 59 min
Director – Rithy Panh
Producer – INA
Director of Photography – Jacques Pamart
Editor – Marie-Christine Rougerie

Through the tragic destiny of Hout Bophana, a young
woman, and her husband Ly Sitha, this film looks back
at Cambodia’s recent history. Disgusted by the
corruption of the Lon Nol regime, Ly Sitha joined the
communist resistance. After their separation the two
young people wrote to each other, and were reunited
after the taking of Phnom Penh. The victory of the
Khmer Rouge was for them to be the start of a
nightmare. Arrested, tortured, and forced to make
improbable confessions, they were both executed in
1976. Rare documents – the transcripts of the
interrogations, and the couple’s repeatedly rewritten
confessions – throw an unusually clear light on the
young couple’s story. The letters exchanged over the
years also bear witness to the conditions in which
they were living at the time.

3) SITE II
France / 1985/ 90 min
Director – Rithy Panh
Director of Photography – Jacque Bouquin
Editor – Andree Davanture

This film deals with the Khmer refugee camp on the
border of Thailand and Cambodia. Site 2 was one of the
many camps housing Cambodian refugees escaping from
the ravages of their country. In the eighties,
Site 2 held 180, 000 refugees living in a 4 mile
space. In this film, Rithy Panh tells the story of one
family living in that space. The film, narrated by the
mother, tells the story of the ‘displaced’ person
uprooted from their culture and country. Site 2 shows
us the family’s daily life and what it means to live
at the mercy of others.The film displays the “refugee
camp” — a place that is all too often only a point of
reference in Western media, and we come to know what
it means to be living in the “country of the other,”
what it does to the body, what it does to the spirit.

4)THE RICE PEOPLE
France/1994/125 min
Director – Rithy Panh
Producer – Jacques Bidou
Cinematography – Jacques Bouquin
Editors – Andrée Davanture, Marie-Christine Rougerie
Screenwriters – Eve Deboise, Rithy Panh,
based on the novel, “ranjau Sepanjang Jalan: by
Shahnon Ahmad

Panh has taken a novel by Malay author Shahnon Ahmad
and transferred it to a Cambodian setting, using one
complete cycle of rice-growing to portray the tragic
fragmentation of a poor rural family. In a remote
village, Poeuv lives with his wife, Om, and their
seven daughters. Poeuv worries about his declining
acreage and Om worries about what would happen if the
sole man in the family was incapacitated. The group
live permanently on a fragile economic balance
dictated by the success or failure of their annual
crop. One day Poeuv is poisoned by a thorn in the foot
and eventually dies. Om takes on the burden of working
in the rice fields as well as running the family. She
becomes increasingly paranoid that her kids aren’t
pulling their weight. The other villagers finally
decide she needs treatment in town, and lock her in a
cage. Eldest daughter Sokha takes over and eventually
brings in the crop.

Biographie

Né à Phnom Penh en 1964, Rithy Panh est le cadet d’une
famille de 9 enfants. Son père, instituteur très
large d’esprit, a entrepris le tour du monde pour
constater les différents modes d’éducation inhérent à
chaque pays… En 1975, il est enrôlé dans les camps
de
rééducation des Khmers Rouges qui viennent d’entrer
dans la capitale. Mais à 15 ans, en 1979, il réussit
à s’échapper pour la Thaïlande. L’année suivante, il
gagne la France puis parvient à intégrer l’IDHEC.
Il signe dès 1989 un premier documentaire déjà primé,
Site 2, sur les réfugiés cambodgiens. Viennent
ensuite Souleymane Cissé, un portrait du grand
réalisateur malien, et Cambodge, entre guerre et
paix,
nouveau documentaire sur l’actualité de son pays. En
1993, il se lance dans le long métrage de fiction avec
un film encore teinté de docu : Les gens de la
Rizière. Il met 5 ans à réaliser Un Soir après la
Guerre, mélo sur fond d’évènements historiques pas
drôles qui émeut pas mal de ses spectateurs (diffusé
sur Canal + puis sur Arte en 2001). Son nouveau film,
présenté à Deauville, ne sortira qu’à la fin de
l’année 2001 sur les écrans…

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