Rithy Panh in Angoulême: 'We have to stop holding filmmakers back'
- Editorial team
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
In Angoulême with four of his films, as part of the Cambodian selection at the Francophone Film Festival, director Rithy Panh spoke to TV5MONDE about his career, his lifelong work on memory, and his view — both fascinated and wary — of artificial intelligence.
A festival that matters
For Rithy Panh, Angoulême is no ordinary festival — he ranks it among the truly 'important' gatherings of Francophone cinema. He said he was especially moved to see full houses all day long, from 9am to 9pm — a morning audience, he noted, that rarely turns out for the movies.
Rebuilding an industry from nothing
Panh looked back on the state of Cambodian cinema after 1979: no filmmakers left, no technicians, no actors — an industry that had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Faced with a wave of hastily made films shot without direct sound, he said he pushed early on to put technical rigour back at the centre of the craft. That conviction led him, from the early 1990s, to found the Bophana Center, an audiovisual memory and training centre where more than 500 technicians have since trained, as well as the Cambodia Film Commission.
He spoke with pride of the new generation of Cambodian filmmakers who came up through these structures, directly or indirectly — starting with Davy Chou, whose first film Panh produced and mentored. That recognition now reaches beyond Cambodia's borders: the country hosts international productions, including Angelina Jolie's, and Becoming Human, the debut feature by Polen Ly, was chosen to represent Cambodia at the Oscars.
Cinema as an act of memory
Panh also described how African cinema — and in particular the work of Malian director Souleymane Cissé — shaped his own approach to filmmaking: getting to the essential, and placing language and culture at the heart of every film. In that same spirit, he presented Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, starring Isabelle Huppert and the late Gaspard Ulliel, to open the Cambodian retrospective in Angoulême.
For Panh, the big screen still holds something irreplaceable against formats built for the length of a metro ride: audiences, he argued, need to be won back toward larger spaces, and given back the pride of seeing and hearing something big, together, rather than alone in front of a phone. He linked that conviction directly to the spirit of the Francophonie, which he sees as far more than a shared language — and whose summit Cambodia will host in November 2026.
A wary eye on artificial intelligence
Asked about artificial intelligence, Panh did not hide a certain fascination — citing a recent AI-assisted brain surgery as remarkable progress. But he said he was just as troubled by films now being made for a few dollars, or the tens of thousands of AI-generated tracks appearing daily on streaming platforms. What worries him most is the idea that some AI systems might discard the works they learned from once they've used them — a concern he tied directly to his own lifelong fight to preserve images and archives.
That work of memory, at the heart of films like S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and The Missing Picture, now continues in another form: an app, Khmer Rouge History, made available to the Cambodian public so they can freely access their own history.
Refusing to be boxed in
Panh finally claimed the right not to be reduced to a single kind of cinema. He rejects the label of 'genocide filmmaker' or 'memory filmmaker', however flattering it might sound: 'I'm simply a filmmaker,' he said — one capable, in his own words, of melodrama as much as comedy, and of matching his imagination against that of an actress like Isabelle Huppert.
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