RITHY PANH (director, designer, filmmaker; Cambodia) was born in Phnom Penh, but expelled from the capital by the Khmer Rouge as an 11-year-old in 1975. He escaped to Thailand in 1979, and lived for a time in a refugee camp in Mairut. He later made his way to Paris, and graduated from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. He returned to Cambodia in 1990, and splits his time between Paris and Phnom Penh. An internationally-acclaimed documentary director and screenwriter, he was named Asian Filmmaker of the Year by the Busan International Film Festival in 2013. He
is the first Cambodian filmmaker nominated for an Oscar for The Missing Picture (2013). The same year, he received a prize in the “Un Certain Regard” category at the Cannes Festival. His documentary S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine was awarded the prestigious Albert Londres Prize in 2004. Most recently, he worked as producer for Angelina Jolie’s film First They Killed My Father, based on Loung Ung’s memoir, released in September 2017. Panh is also the founder of the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, which makes film, photography, and sound archives on Cambodia publicly available, and trains a new generation of Cambodian filmmakers and multimedia technicians.
