A Manifesto in the Dark: CIFF 360 Opens with Rithy Panh's Unflinching Gaze
- Editorial team
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
There is, in certain programming choices, something that resembles a manifesto. Opening an international film festival not with an entertainment film, not with a light comedy or a universal drama, but with Meeting with Pol Pot—this sets a demand from the outset. That of a cinema that questions, that disturbs, that refuses the ease of the gaze.
This is nevertheless what CIFF 360 has chosen to inaugurate its 2026 edition. This Wednesday evening, in Kampot, by the Old Bridge, Rithy Panh's work will be screened at nightfall, facing the river. The Cambodian sky as a ceiling, the sound of water as a natural soundtrack, and on the screen: one of the most intense films of the decade.
Rithy Panh, or the duty of the gaze
Rithy Panh needs no introduction to fans of auteur cinema. From S-21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine to The Missing Picture, Palme d'Or in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2013, the Cambodian filmmaker has devoted his entire body of work to a single enterprise: ensuring that history does not fall silent. Himself a survivor of the Khmer genocide—he lost his entire family in the camps—he has become the guardian of a memory that many would prefer to bury.
Meeting with Pol Pot (2024) marks a turning point in his work. Adapted from the account of American journalist Elisabeth Becker, who was one of the few Westerners to enter Democratic Kampuchea in 1978—mere months before the regime's fall—the film reconstructs this impossible encounter with the leader of Southeast Asia's deadliest regime. One hundred and twelve minutes of subdued tension, clinical strangeness, and unease that never fully dissipates.
“A festival that does not seek to entertain at all costs, but to make people think—and feel.”
Kampot, city of a particular night
The choice of location is no accident. Kampot is a city that carries several centuries of mingled memory within it: French colonial presence, Art Deco architecture crumbling with grace, the golden youth of the 1960s, then silence and ruin under the Khmer Rouge, and finally a slow resurrection. Its streets smell of pepper and river. It has something of a French provincial town from the early last century—the arcades, wooden balconies, cafés open to the night—and something irreducibly Khmer.
It is in this setting that CIFF 360 has chosen to plant its first screen. Near the Old Bridge—a local symbol of resistance and continuity—the open-air screening transforms the evening into something that transcends a mere cultural event.
Seeing Meeting with Pol Pot in Cambodia itself, in the warm May air, surrounded by an audience that carries this history in its family genes: it is an experience of a different nature than watching the film in a European theater.
The meaning of an opening
CIFF 360 could have started differently. It could have chosen a more consensual work, a more festive entry point, a film that unites without offending. It chose the opposite. And it is precisely this that gives it its singularity in the regional festival landscape.
Starting tomorrow, the festival shifts to Kep for its official opening ceremony, set for May 14—the birthday of His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni. The programming will then expand to historical Khmer cinema, emerging voices, short films on marine biodiversity, up to the world premiere of Far Away Close to You by Mony Darung on Saturday evening. Five days of cinema between Kampot and Kep. But it all begins here, this night, with a single film and a single question: how to face history head-on?
Program for May 13 — Kampot
16:00 Installation of the projection setupAround the Old Bridge, Kampot
18:30 Meeting with Pol Pot — Rithy Panh (2024, 112 min)Open-air screening · Original version in Khmer with English subtitles · Free entry
CIFF 360 in Kep — May 13 to 17, 2026, Kampot and Kep provinces. All events are free access.
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