Irradiated

Rithy Panh / France, Cambodia / 2020 / East European Premiere / 88 min.

synopsis

An archival memento of the horrors of war in the 20th century that delves into philosophical reflections on the nature of evil and the meaning of suffering. Raw images of prisoners in concentration and labor camps and victims of nuclear attacks are a chronicle of global human tragedy. The sensory and emotional experience is multiplied by a vertically divided image, which triples each shot. The dramatic content and Pahn’s stylistic quirkiness, however, are not an outright attempt to rattle the viewers’ cages. His philosophical essay, dedicated to documentary filmmaker and concentration camp survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens, fights back against the contagion of oblivion that is spreading through the current infinitely changing and accelerated audiovisual landscape.

“Big media changes images every ten seconds. The next day, no one cares what happened yesterday. No one thinks about the consequences of what happened in the past.” R. Panh

biography

Rithy Panh (1964) fled his native Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge and settled in Paris in the 1980s, where he graduated from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. In his films he processes his own experiences with the Pol Pot regime. For his documentary The Missing Picture (2013), he was nominated for an Oscar. The Ji.hlava IDFF presented his films Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers (2007) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011)