Prêmios

This is a striking combination of tableaux with clay figurines and archive images which blend into an important and original timepiece.

For confronting the unimaginable in a pure and restrained way.

For its dramatic denunciation of the use of individual and collective pathology as a political instrument to annihilate a society.

There have already been many films made about genocide, but until now none have ever shown us the perpetrators of these horrors in such close proximity. The horror is expressed through physical and verbal reenaction, helping us to approach that which can never be understood: that ordinary people could become machines, killing without emotion or conscience. All these elements contribute to the creation of a truly educational film about "ordinary executioners," and their involvement in mass exterminations.

It contrasts living conditions out of the 19th century with technology in the era of globalization. The filmmaking process parallels the hardships that the film's subjects, the workers laying down the cable, were enduring. The director achieves the rare feat of bringing daily life to the screen and that-even rarer-of conveying the physicality of labor. Through these, he makes the tragedies of Cambodian history felt in a concrete way.

Among other outstanding works of the highest quality the jury has unanimously decided to give the main award to the film that brings together victims and perpetrators of the genocide in Cambodia. This drama like situation questions most profoundly the roots of violence and evil. The jury was impressed by the commitment, persistency and discipline by which the filmmaker and participants forced themselves to go through the painful process of reconstruction of horrors that the human beings are capable of doing. The jury finds the film extremely powerful, disturbing, courageous and masterfully directed.

8th place.

After fifty years, the maturity and distance acquired allow the director to return to the excruciating experience of his childhood under the Cambodian dictatorship, charged with immense pain, yet cleansed of any thirst for revenge. The film narrates the violence without even being violent, in a work full of humanity, poetry, credible and touching, but never rhetorical. The awareness that the missing picture will never be found does not destroy the hope for a life free of oppression.

Second Place; tied with Tiexi qu (2002) and A Vila (2004)