Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh was born on Apr 18, 1964 in Cambodia. Rithy Panh's big-screen debut came with The Rice People directed by Rithy Panh in 1994. Rithy Panh is known for First They Killed My Father directed by Angelina Jolie, Sareum Srey Moch stars as Loung Ung and Phoeung Kompheak as Pa Ung. Rithy Panh has got 46 awards and 44 nominations so far. The most recent award Rithy Panh achieved is Berlin International Film Festival. The upcoming new movie Rithy Panh plays is First They Killed My Father which will be released on Sep 15, 2017.

Rithy Panh was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on the 18th april 1964. He is today one of the most acclaimed documentary filmmakers and the most famous Cambodian filmmaker worldwide. After 1975 his family died through the genocidal Khmer Rouge government (1975-1979) while he could escape in 1979 to Thailand. Panh arrived a year later in Paris, France as an orphan and stayed. Rithy Panh later studied at 'La Fémis', the French National Cinema School. In 1989, Site 2 (1989), his first documentary about Cambodian refugees, won several international awards. Since then Panh created a unique body of work consisting of documentaries and feature films that mostly deal with the modern Cambodia and the traumatic legacy of the Khmer Rouge regime. His most famous documentary is probabaly S21, la machine de mort khmère rouge (2003) about the infamous torture prison of the Khmer Rouge. Later his avant-garde documentary L'image manquante (2013) became the first Cambodian film nominated for an Academy Award as 'Best Foreign Language Film'. Rithy Panh, along with director Ieu Pannakar, has developed 'Bophana: Audio Visual Resource Center - Cambodia', with an aim towards preserving the country's film, photographic and audio history. Rithy Panh received an honorary doctorate in 2011 by the University of Paris-VIII and published in 2012 his acclaimed autobiography "L'Élimination". In 2014 he received the 'Preservation and Scholarship' Award of the International Documentary Association (IDA).