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"The Missing Picture" is a very unusual documentary and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It's so unusual because filmmaker Rithy Panh tells the story both with archival footage AND little figurines that he created for the film! Perhaps this was a way to make the horror of the Khmer Rouge easier for the audience to watch, as an hour and a half of footage of atrocities would be just about unwatchable considering how brutal this regime was. And, since you don't see live actors in the film-- just narration and film clips, seeing it in its original French language or the optional English language form is a roughly identical experience, or at least I assume so.

While I enjoyed how unique this film was and figure its uniqueness probably led to its Oscar nomination, I must confess that the narration made an exciting story very, very slow and a bit tedious. Perhaps the French language version is better, I don't know. All I know is that a film like "The Killing Fields" or a regular documentary about the subject is something I could have enjoyed or at least stuck with better.

Rithy Panh fled his native Cambodia for Thailand in 1979, and soon after his family died in a refugee camp. Panh ended up in Paris and became interested in film. Life under the Khmer Rouge and its legacy became the subject matter of his new life as a film director in France. His latest documentary "The Missing Picture" deals with those who were children from 1975 to 1979 when the communist movement seized the Cambodian capital and introduced a system of death resulting in a society so impoverished that private property was reduced to slogans or empty promises. In one of the film's most chilling mise-en-scènes, bank notes fall from the sky in Phnom Penh.

"The Missing Picture" invites us to a faraway country of nostalgia, where clay figurines represent, in many cases, the dead. The figurines find their place in the imagination somewhere between painting and animation; it's stop motion without motion, but by holding the figurines still, it is the heart that moves, or at least that's the idea. This is a difficult film to watch. Part of what you make of a film is what you bring to it, contrary to the belief that all films screen in the mind on a tabula rasa. "The Missing Picture" requires patience, imagination and a considerable amount of effort toward empathy because it's nearly impossible to identify with extreme suffering from genocide. You have to wonder if it's not the job of the director to make this easier? Does Panh overindulge in telling a story? But more importantly, is this a story that can be told? Panh has very few pictures from the genocide; he uses a French, first-person narrative; and there are no witnesses from his family that can testify of his highly personal memoir. Why should we believe him? After all the narrator, Randal Douc says, "there is no truth, there is only cinema". Only by using this radical lens to look at Panh's work can we gauge the level of loneliness in Panh. In a way it is madness, a vision of purity alien to the world, and Panh has nothing to show for it, hence, the title "The Missing Picture".

From passages of this film you realize that it takes little to satisfy man: work and food. And it is only in man's dreams that complexity arises. "It starts with purity, and ends with hate," says the narrator. Aren't the two, hate and purity, just different sides of the same coin? Many atrocities have been carried out in the name of purity. At intervals, throughout the film, waves wash over the screen as a symbol of purity. The freedom that Panh's father died for, is tragically a pretense of purity. When the families share their food, there is more hunger than food so they mostly share their hunger, and hunger is a pretense of purity. Reeducating people in the rice fields--after being forced out of their homes and into the countryside--is a pretense of purity. "Childhood is a constant refrain" says the narrator, but childhood is also a pretense of purity. There is something missing in all this, purity. And tragically all there is to show is hate.

History, it is said, is written by the victors. But sometimes, it is the victims - or more accurately, the survivors - who get to do the writing. That is the case with Rithy Panh, a Cambodian who survived the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Panh was a mere child when he suffered the loss of his parents and siblings in the various grueling work camps to which they had been consigned. As an adult, Panh went on to become a documentary filmmaker dedicated to telling his story to the world. It was a purge aimed mainly at the intelligentsia of Cambodian society - the well-off and educated - who posed the greatest threat to the regime's vision of a collectivist agrarian utopia.

Where, Panh asks, are all the pictures of children starving, of people being worked into the grave that more accurately portray the reality of this 20th Century holocaust? Somehow, those were not recorded and preserved for posterity. Instead, we get a series of grainy propaganda images - of workers seemingly happy in their toil, of leaders of the revolution inspiring the masses with their promises of a Communist paradise - that were officially sanctioned by the government. So Panh has taken it upon himself to provide the "missing" pictures the Pol Pot regime failed to provide to the world.

The Oscar-nominated documentary "The Missing Picture" is a stark, haunting illustration of what life was like under Pol Pot's brutal dictatorship. The director alternates between grainy, mostly black-and- white footage taken at the time and diorama-style re-creations using strategically arranged and intricately carved clay figurines. These frozen, expressionless figures, with their searching, unblinking eyes, lift the suffering that the actual people endured to a near-surreal level, while the wistful, soft-spoken narration by Jean-Baptiste Phou echoes the human tragedy at the core. Indeed, the approach Panh has taken manages to personalize a holocaust that, given its enormous breadth and scope - an estimated one to three million people died under the regime - would otherwise be incomprehensible to the human mind. "The Missing Picture," by "going small," paradoxically helps us to see the tragedy writ large.

I love me some slow, moody, atmospheric and introspective films. Yet I found this to be really, really slow at times. The premise of using clay figurines is a great one, and at times it really added to the film's power by not forcing images and allowing us to use our imagination, but it was used a lot and together with sort of ho-hum archival footage, and the dreamy narration, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find the film to be really slow to watch at times. It just got a bit repetitive and the subject matter wasn't presented in a more fascinating way. Still, I found some of it effective and the film is pretty original in that way so I have to give it props where they are due.

"A picture can be stolen - a thought cannot" states the narrator of this documentary about the atrocities committed by Khmer Rouge in late 1970s Cambodia. While not actually narrated by him for reasons unknown, the script for the film is written by director Rithy Panh, a survivor of the atrocities, in an usual touch, Panh uses clay figures to depict incidents he experienced but for which no archive footage exists. Going back to that earlier quote, the film stands up as a testament of the human mind to recall personal horrors in great detail as one's thoughts can never be stolen. The clay figures are remarkably detailed and especially effective in a moment when Panh recalls drinking muddied water while watched by seemingly stunned local herds. Unique as the film may be though, it outstays its welcome long before it is over. The narration is extremely repetitive and as the film keeps focusing on emotions that its director personally felt, it crosses the border into maudlin territory while ultimately becoming less a document of the times and more the faded memories of a single man. The film is very deliberately paced too so one really needs to be in the right mood to appreciate it. The clay work is, however, never less than remarkable and as the film takes time to focus on Panh also creating all the models, sculpting then painting them, it is hard not to admire the care and consideration put into them. This was clearly a very personal film for Panh and the fact that the film makes one want to read up more about the Khmer Rouge horrors certainly says something.