The Films of Tomonari Nishikawa

Tomonari Nishikawa’s films are a thrilling cinematic dialogue between the places, spaces, and architecture he documented and the filmstock, cameras, and lenses he used to record.

Series: Alternative Visions

Rice People

Directed by Rithy Panh, 1994
Introduction: Sylvia Tiwon

Rithy Panh’s debut narrative feature, finished only a few years after Cambodia’s decade-long post–Khmer Rouge civil war, was the country’s first-ever submission to the foreign-language category at the Oscars.

Series: Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

Lightning

Directed by Mikio Naruse, 1952

Adapted from a Fumiko Hayashi novel, and starring Mikio Naruse’s favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, this major work illuminates one of the director’s key themes: entrapment within the family system.

Series: Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman

The Missing Picture

Directed by Rithy Panh, 2013
Introduction: Michael Mascuch

Rithy Panh’s revelatory look at his childhood experiences surviving the Khmer Rouge won the 2013 Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Clay figures, archival footage, and spoken words weave a stunningly vivid picture of the filmmaker’s and Cambodia’s past.

Series: Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

Meeting with Pol Pot

Directed by Rithy Panh, 2024
Introduction: Penny Edwards

Three French journalists visit Cambodia in 1978 and discover the deadly gap between what is shown, what is hidden, and what they are “permitted” to document. “A hauntingly timeless depiction of power and its mechanisms” (Variety).

Series: Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

The Burnt Theatre

Directed by Rithy Panh, 2005

Cambodia’s once-grand, now-abandoned former National Theatre is the site of Rithy Panh’s spellbinding investigation of how to rebuild one’s country when culture is nearly forgotten and capitalism all-powerful. Chosen for the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Series: Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

One Evening After the War

Directed by Rithy Panh, 1998
Introduction: Penny Edwards

Set in 1992, after two decades of war finally ended in Cambodia, this atmospheric urban noir/doomed romance follows a demobilized soldier and a dance-hall girl as they drift through a Phnom Penh of neon and dust, still haunted by death.

Series: Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

Everything Will Be OK

Directed by Rithy Panh, 2022

A dystopian, Animal Farm–like world created out of clay figurines provides an ingenious backdrop to Rithy Panh’s intellectually barnstorming look at twentieth-century brutality. History lesson, archival footage masterclass, folk-art animation, and science fiction narrative in one, inspired by Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, Umberto Eco, Mao, 2001, and more. 

Series: Cambodian Elegist: The Films of Rithy Panh

Wife

Directed by Mikio Naruse, 1953

Another affecting look at the everyday irritations of marriage, but with an atypical twist for Naruse—this time, the husband is the more sympathetic character.

Series: Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman

Juvenile Court

Directed by Frederick Wiseman, 1973
Introduction: Judge Trina L. Thompson

4K Digital Restoration

Juvenile Court finds troubled youth and their families confronted by the American justice system in Memphis, Tennessee. It is Frederick Wiseman’s first film to eclipse a two-hour run time, “but its cumulative impact is so powerful that it seems less than half that long” (Image).

Series: Frederick Wiseman: America at Work

Gunvor Nelson: Program 1

In Conversation: Steve Anker, Lynne Sachs, John Sundholm

BAMPFA Collection

Gunvor Nelson’s My Name Is Oona, a hypnotic portrait of the artist’s daughter and an essential classic of experimental cinema, screens with Schmeerguntz, a touchstone of feminist cinema, and Frame Line and Light Years, made in Sweden.

Series: Gunvor Nelson: A Life in Film