Among those who directly experienced Khmer Rouge atrocities (1975–79), filmmaker Rithy Panh is probably one of the most active. He has extensively engaged in the production of cultural memory about the regime and its aftermath. Panh's films, most of which draw on individual voices of victims, including members of his own family, offer creative cinematic techniques and rich audiovisual representations of social and historical events in Cambodia and beyond. His work also embeds within it a conception of the “soul,” which can be understood through Cambodian Buddhist and animist worldviews as a “spirit” that “names the interrelatedness of all persons—human and other-than-human—within a richly diverse community of life” (7).
Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai's The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul consists of fifteen well-written essays, including the introduction chapter, which critically examine different aspects of Panh's cinematic work since the late 1980s. As an interdisciplinary volume, it...
