Alisa Lebow interviews Deirdre Boyle on the occasion of the publication of her remarkable and important new book Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh.
Contents
Show Notes:
Rithy Panh is the most famous Cambodian director in the world, with more than twenty films to his name, documentary and fiction, and yet he remains little known in the English speaking world. Documentary specialists will be familiar with a few of his best known works, mainly his unparalleled “perpetrator” film S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) in which former cadres contend with their past at an infamous security prison under the Khmer Rouge regime, and his academy award nominated The Missing Picture, in which he uses clay figurines to represent his memories during the Pol Pot regime’s extermination campaign. While both of these films are undeniably masterpieces of filmmaking, they represent a small portion of his oeuvre, which is as varied as it is original.
In this episode, Alisa Lebow interviews Deirdre Boyle, the author of the recent monograph Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh (Rutgers University Press, 2023). Boyle, who is both a film scholar and a psychotherapist, spent nearly a decade researching Panh’s films and his impressive cultural work. Her unique book weaves in-depth research with personal reflections as she recounts the process of piecing together all of the accomplishments of this fascinating filmmaker along with the complexities of the socio-political history and cultural context in which his work is steeped. Boyle discusses her motivations for writing the book and provides profound insight into the workings of this singular director. We hope this interview steers readers towards Boyle’s fascinating book, and even more so, to exploring the full range of Panh’s extraordinary films.
Rithy Panh, Partial Filmography:
(*Films mentioned by name in the podcast episode)
- Cambodia: Between War and Peace (1991)
- *Rice People (Neak Sre) (1994)
- *Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (1996)
- One Evening After the War (1998)
- The Land of the Wandering Souls (2000)
- Que la barque se brise, que la jonque s’entrouvre (“Let the boat break its back, Let the junk break open”) (French television) (2001)
- *S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003)
- The People of Angkor (2003)
- The Burnt Theatre (2005)
- Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers (2007)
- The Sea Wall (2008)
- Gibier d’élevage (2011)
- *Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2012)
- *The Missing Picture (2013)
- La France est notre patrie (2015)
- Exile (2016)
- *First They Killed My Father (Angelina Jolie, 2017) – Panh served as producer
- *Graves Without a Name (2018)
- *Irradiated (2020)
- *Meeting with Pol Pot (2024)
Other works referenced in the interview:
- Opera/Musical Bongsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia (Rithy Panh: writer, director, 2017) https://www.bangsokolalbum.com
- The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, et.al., 2012)
Bibliography:
- Barnes, Leslie and Joseph Mai (2021) Ed. The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (Rutgers University Press)
- Boyle, Deirdre (2023) Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh (Rutgers University Press)
- Ly, Boreth (2019) Traces of Trauma Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawai’i Press)
- Panh, Rithy and Christophe Bataille (2014) The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields
Episode Transcript:
https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/avm1/files/2025/04/Deirdre-Boyle_episode-transcript.pdf
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