︎︎︎
ESSAY
SHADOW(ING) AS EMBODIMENT AND WITNESS IN
By Sopheak Sam
Draft: August 18, 2025
ESSAY
SHADOW(ING) AS EMBODIMENT AND WITNESS IN
RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT
By Sopheak Sam
Draft: August 18, 2025
ABSTRACT
![Figure 1. “Sbek Thom (shadow puppet theatre) rehearsal of a student troupe organised by Cambodian Living Arts.” Wat Bo, Siem Riep, 10 February 2013. Photo by Catherine F Grant. ResearchGate.]()
“For the shadow is his and the penumbra is his
and his the perplexity of the phenomenon.”
INTRODUCTION
“Did you notice, Bong?” Asked my friend Puthik, probing my attention to detail after we watched Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (Meeting with Pol Pot, 2024) at the Aeon Mall cineplex in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, “that was Pu Rithy.”
It was my first experience sitting in a theater filled entirely with other Cambodians, and I couldn’t help but take note of the audience’s reactions. Glancing over at the auntie across the row who chuckled whenever the French actors delivered Khmer lines, overhearing a couple’s whispered attempts at live-translating the subtitles[1], and witnessing the sudden moment when the audience collectively fell silent at the climatic arrival of Pol Pot—or, his shadowy presence—appearing on screen. In this film, unlike in earlier conventional depictions that relied on archival footage, Pot is not rendered as a fully visible figure. Instead, filmmaker Rithy Panh traced the silhouette of the former Khmer Rouge leader to obfuscate this corporeal encounter and further subverted it by casting himself as the shadow of Pol Pot.
This essay argues that Panh’s self-casting as Pol Pot’s shadow turns “shadow(ing)” into a double practice—embodiment for performers and witnessing for audiences—through intermedial archives and sets-within-sets that produce a techno-shadow of Khmer Rouge memory.
For literary scholar William Chapman Sharpe, “shadow-work” is the unconscious processing of shadows in life and art that we unknowingly do all the time.[2] The persistent uncertainty of whether a shadow is Self or Other is a tension that’s at the core of Panh’s destabilizing embodiment of Pol Pot. In the filmmaker’s “return to fiction”, Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot follows three French journalists who are invited to Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 to witness for themselves the Khmer Rouge regime’s claims of utopia. Their sojourn unravels as deception and paranoia surfaces to reveal a revolution rapidly in decline. Photographer Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï) mysteriously disappears. As the war intensifies and fear of an approaching Vietnamese incursion, the remaining journalists Lise Delbo (Irène Jacob) and Alain Cariou (Cyril Gueï) are taken to meet Pol Pot at his hideout in Phnom Penh where they finally conduct an interview. With horrors of war and genocide hidden in plain sight, the film ends with an assassination and a grim allegorical note on the folly of political ideologues.
Firsthand accounts from the book When the War Was Over by American journalist Elizabeth Becker became the blueprint for Panh’s Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot. Becker had been reporting on armed conflict in Southeast Asia since 1973 and was one of the few Westerners—along with academic Malcolm Caldwell and journalist Richard Dudman (inspiration for the characters Alain and Paul, respectively)—invited to tour Democratic Kampuchea just before the Khmer Rouge collapsed in 1979.
Above all, the film’s political overtones largely focus on the role of journalism. For Panh, “the aim” of the film was to “question the role of the journalist in the field, which is tending to disappear.” Viewers are taken on a journey in time as witnesses, literally and figuratively, through the lens of journalism. I argue however that the deployment of key aesthetic and historical slippages (which are ahistorical, and at times, magical) in the film are overlooked and undervalued in their capacities to “make sense” of the realities of war in its reconciliation of fragmentary memory and history. Pol Pot’s phantasmagorical shadow becomes a capacious vessel for political meaning-making, embodying the “nothingness” of absence while still being “here” and “there”—an encapsulation of the persisent hauntings of war and genocide among survivors and within Cambodian subjectivity at large.
Drawing on the multivalent properties of shadows as literal and figurative phenomenologies, this essay reframes Sharpe’s “shadow-work” as “shadow(ing)” to constitute an assemblage of interconnected political, cultural, and linguistic materials to help us better understand shadow’s potential in reading and analyzing the work of Rithy Panh. “Shadow(ing)”—as opposed to “shadow-work”—underscores the auteurist nature of Panh’s filmmaking and the aesthetic idiosyncrasies of his memory-storytelling. In Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot, specifically, his intermedial use of archives (archives-within-an-archive) and his layered mise-en-scène (sets-within-a-set) demonstrate “shadow(ing)” as repetition and its (im)material relationality between shadow, source, and surface. Borrowing from the work of film theorist James F. Moyer (2007), I situate cinematic memory as a “techno-shadow,” a term I use to describe the cinematic techniques analogous to shadowy properties: projection, absent, unconscious, depth, passive, dependent on light, and an extension of the self (and in this case, of history). To this end, I zone in on Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot to theorize how the film's seamless melding of fictional and nonfictional fragments piece together to constitute a techno-shadow of this particular dark history. I take this a step further to claim that “shadow(ing)” is an act of both embodying (for the actors) and witnessing (for the audience)—standing-in for what is absent to redirect our gaze to the source.
SHADOW REALMS AND MEDIASCAPES
Resisting the urge to follow the established analysis of this film's political themes, I instead focus on how visual strategies are employed to craft atmosphere and space, creating what I perceive as a "shadow realm" through the director's world-building. Viscerally unnerving, Rithy Panh’s Rendezvous avec Pol Pot is all about “shadow(ing)” and how it shapes the psychology and mood of the film. From the way scenes transition from day-to-night, creating atmospheric tensions that shift between sun-soaked paranoia and evening silences. The film’s setting in 1978 Democratic Kampuchea, as author and journalist Elizabeth Becker (the real-life counterpart to Irène Jacob’s character Lise Delbo) aptly describes in her book, “was like walking into the Twilight Zone” of Cambodia. Particularly during the last half-hour of the film when our protagonists are led to Phnom Penh—the city is completely abandoned and reduced to a ghostly shell—the shadows of the modernist buildings take on a haunting presence, culminating in a surreal moment of magical realism that I will later explore in this section.
The film opens with a shadow—the silhouette of an airplane flying through an overcast sky carrying our three French journalists (Fig. 5). Panh, as in many of his earlier films such as Bophana (1996), begins with black-and-white video that transitions into color, signaling temporal crossings and the blurred boundary between his camera and found footage. Aerial views of miles-long lines of rice fields, enclosed by lush mountainous forests, are interspersed with interior shots of the journalists on the plane: Alain reading a book, Lise filming from a window, Paul fidgeting. Upon second viewing, we realize that the landscape shots are a combination of archival and contemporary footage along with miniature sets, which will become a recurring motif in the staging and mise en scène. From the start, we enter Panh’s (techno-)shadow realm of history and cinema, of past and present, oscillating on the 4:3 ratio screen as if to affirm the seamless intertwinement of fiction and documentary.
We are acquainted with the charismatic Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), who is inspired by real-life Scottish academic and prolific Marxist writer Malcolm Caldwell, who, having been one of the staunchest defenders of Pol Pot, suffered a similar and unfortunate fate as his character. Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï) a Black, Ivorian-French photographer, is the analogue of Becker’s other accompanied guest, American journalist Richard Dudman who spent much of his career reporting on authoritarianism, war, and revolutions in the global south. Paul is the most cantankerous of the group—unwilling to play by the regime’s games. Panh imagined him, similar to Dudman, as someone who “had already covered many other conflicts and photographed other countries in the grip of dictatorship,” suggesting his character is the most clear-eyed due to this. Lise Delbo (Panh’s tribute to Holocaust survivor and memoirist Charlotte Delbo) is of course Elizabeth Becker. She inhabits a quiet composure and is the empathetic intermediary between Paul and Alain, who respond differently to the revolutionaries.
They arrive stranded on a vacant and desolate landing strip. Already, Lise is unnerved and lights a cigarette: “we’re not at Pochentong.” The trio deduce they are in the rural northwest as they are soon greeted by a caravan of armed soldiers and comrade Sung (Bun-Hok Lim). Sung, who is Minister of Foreign Affairs and is their French guide and translator, urges the Westerners to call him “comrade” (in Khmer, they use the word mitt – meaning “friend”). Despite comrade Sung’s mild-mannered and “civilized” demeanor, Lise divulges to her colleagues that he’s “just as cruel as the others.”
The trio are driven to an undisclosed military post (I surmise Battambang for its idyllic rural province and made popular by golden age singer Sinn Sisamouth). Arriving at a brutalist, concrete building heavily guarded with soldiers and adorned with communist paraphernalia—the three take their first steps into what Panh describes as a “Potemkin village”. The journalists are supervised at all times during their visit on highly-curated tours of a new Kampuchean society. The film doesn’t take long to break the facade of the regime’s revolution. On their first day, we witness iconoclasm and propaganda art, restriction against photographing farmers/citizens, an interview with Ieng Thirith (Somaline Mao), a historical figure and influential member of the party, who offers inconsistent answers to the “mysterious” civilian deaths reported by refugees. This charade occurs conspicuously during the daytime under a climate of perpetual tropical heat. The film’s color balance of warm yellow, oranges, and green, reproduces the sensuous atmospheric air of Cambodian weather but contradicts these common conceptions and ideas around “light” as a symbol of truth and life.
“We’re all alone in this crazy place. We need to help each other,” says Paul to Lise during a nighttime encounter. We first witness moments of intimacy, care, and reflection when the journalists retire to their rooms and share liquor, smoke cigarettes, read, write, and exchange secrets. Lise is secretly carrying cash, in hopes to give it to her friend Bophana. In the dark shadows of the evening, there is an opportunity, away from the regime, to truly be themselves. This moment echoes what Becker details in her experience of her visit as “travel[ing] in a bubble” and no one being allowed to “speak to [her] freely.”
One striking visual cue in this night scene is how clearly the silhouettes of Lise and Paul’s shadows are filmed (fig. 6-7), perhaps foreshadowing the anticipated meeting with Pol Pot. Across the eventide of empty landscapes and deserted buildings, these nighttime scenes serve as transitioning points in storytelling where crucial events occur at night that alters the plot irrevocably: disappearances and deaths that go unseen.
In the final thirty minutes of the film, the characters relocate to Phnom Penh, and a peculiar nighttime scene unfolds where intermedial fragments of archival imagery take center stage. After her interview with regime leader Pol Pot is abruptly cut short, Lise Delbo travels with Khmer Rouge soldiers in the back of a military truck en route to a temporary guesthouse. Suddenly and without hesitation, she brazenly runs off. This moment parallels Elizabeth Becker’s own account of disbelief upon seeing Phnom Penh completely evacuated—a realization she described as only sinking in when she witnessed it firsthand. What is Lise searching for? Perhaps Bophana? Perhaps anybody. Or, is this what Panh wanted to portray as an exemplar of journalistic integrity and courage: in the field and searching for answers at any cost. Against the backdrop of a decaying cityscape, “aloneness” and loss of self become themes revisited—having been consistently explored in Panh’s earlier works. For viewers of the film, we get a tiny glimpse of that experience via the surrogacy of the actors performance, of the systemic alienation of the Khmer Rouge. This social death was marked by the severing of human connections and the destruction of social bonds that provide coherence, meaning, and purpose to one's life.
Wandering alone through the dark and desolate streets of Phnom Penh, Lise enters an abandoned building, unsure of what she might find. Inside, a forgotten tea set sits untouched, and bats flutter out of a window at the sudden presence of a human. Bathed in moonlit shadows, she steps into a room where the melody of a pinpeat orchestra fills the air. On the concrete wall, a video is projected, showing elders offering incense and scattering flowers at a wedding, followed by scenes of people dancing in celebration (Fig. 8). Lise sifts through family photographs of strangers, her movements slow and deliberate, before the camera cuts to a montage of archival footage showing a ransacked and emptied home.
This sequence exemplifies Panh’s plea for engaging with the “afterlives of the archives.” In what can be thought of as “shadow-work” or “shadow(ing),” the filmmaker engages with the capacious materiality of archives to open up spaces of witness and memorialization, but also recovery. Beyond documenting atrocities, but to preserve photographic evidence of one’s self and one’s dignity. Across Panh’s oeuvre, the dignity of the victims and survivors are paramount. As Panh himself has stated, “Genocide is not only killings; it is not only deaths. It is much more than that. It is the complete destruction and deprivation of our culture and our identity.” It is through this shadowy evening scene that Panh’s case for cinema, filmmaking, art and culture becomes presently evident.
Situating this encounter inside the shell of an abandoned home gestures towards contemporary issues in Phnom Penh, such as the rapid pace of urban development and the demolition of historically and artistically significant spaces like the White Building. Here, architectural space becomes a witness to history, a silent testament to severed human connections and fractured families. As I watch this scene in Phnom Penh, I realize – empty home serves as a metaphor for loss, its shadowy presence a surface through which Lise bears witness to the beforelives and afterlives of the victims. The city of Phnom Penh is portrayed as a shadow, an archive, one that has seen bodies come and go and is able to hold onto those traces.
RE-STAGING HISTORY: ARCHIVES WITHIN ARCHIVE
Scholar Pamela Corey, whose extensive research exploring the intersection of contemporary art and urban intervention in Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City, offers a critical reconceptualization of scale. Corey’s framework becomes useful in analyzing Panh’s idiosyncratic use of clay figurines which has now become a signature of the filmmaker with Rendezvous avec Pol Pot marking his third collaboration with artist Sarith Mang, following L’Image manquante (The Missing Picture, 2013) and Everything Will Be OK (2022). Applying Corey’s conceptual apparatus of “scale” in human geography which identifies the relationality of power, control, and resistance, allows us to answer, “why little clay figurines?” Drawing on Sallie Marston’s definition of scale as “a level of representation” and “a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents,” Corey situates scale as a critical tool for understanding contemporary art practices. She highlights how Cambodian artists employ their bodies and performances to symbolically engage with multiple scales of interaction—ranging from the urban and national to the regional.
In Panh’s case, one can easily make the connection of scaling through the manipulation of camera positioning, which shifts and zooms fluidly between macro and micro perspectives. However, beyond adjusting size or perspective, the filmmaker uses scale as a critical tool to address and intertwine global discourses in nuanced ways. It is not a coincidence that in this film there are wide-angle shots of desolate lush landscapes that linger, to foreground the “aloneness” that Khatharya Um had articulated in Cambodian subjecthood, but could also likely intersect with contemporary issues of deforestation, land degradation, land rights, and displacements of indigenous communities. I argue that Panh speaks through multiple modes through a centralizing motif because of the natural intersectionality and interconnectedness of these issues: war, genocide, development, class divide, authoritarianism, climate crises. These themes are not isolated; rather, they are interconnected, forming a web of systemic violence and survival. Thus, the question is not why Panh uses scale to address these intersecting issues, but how he does so. And to what effect?
In L’Image manquante, Panh’s Academy Award-nominated documentary, the filmmaker expressed his intent clearly—signaled in the very title of the film. Reflecting on his process, he said, “And I think to tell the story, it’s good to work with your hand, with your heart, with clay, with water, with the sun, you know, to dry it, come to work with the elements of life.” It is through the absence of a visual documentation that Panh began incorporating the clay figurines but also to investigate the archival status of the earth as a medium and metaphor for documenting the Cambodian disaster. Jennifer Cazenave touches on clay’s potential as materials of mourning as well as the environmental implications of Pol Pot’s failed agrarian utopia. The stillness of the clay figurines (fig. 9-10) is particularly haunting, as they seem to embody frozen moments in time, evoking the filmmaker’s role as a kind of time traveler bearing witness to lives interrupted.
While the logic of using clay figurines to reenact a “missing picture” feels apt for a documentary, their inclusion in a fictionalized narrative such as Rendezvous avec Pol Pot raises deeper questions. Why extend this visual language into a non-documentary context? In one pivotal scene, Lise wanders through an abandoned home in Phnom Penh, encountering traces of memory through family photographs and projected archival footage. Similarly, Paul, the Black French photographer, encounters the archives through his camera lens in an especially striking moment. In this instance, multiple layers of archival media interface (fig. 11): Paul stands before a miniature clay set depicting an agrarian scene, while behind him, a projection of archival footage shows the mass forced evacuation to the countryside. This is just one of numerous examples of Panh playing with archives and colliding them in what I call archives-within-an-archive and sets-within-a-set, as an act of “shadow(ing).”
Corey’s concept of “scale,” particularly as it relates to power, presence, and site, is most vividly realized in an early scene where Comrade Sung escorts the three journalists to a warehouse. Within, artisans labor to produce propaganda art while repurposing metal scraps from Western cars into farming tools. Towering portraits of Pol Pot are in various stages of completion, accompanied by scenic paintings of rural Cambodia and Marxist-Leninist-inspired history paintings. This scene visually underscores how scale operates under the regime’s ideological vision, with artists compelled to reimagine an agrarian utopia that embodies the regime’s propaganda.
The clay figurine sets are introduced in a scene where a comrade is confused by Sung’s suggestion to demolish Wat Phnom in place of a sculpture of Brother Number One (fig. 12). Throughout the film, we begin to see how the regime’s “Potemkin village,” which encloses sets-within-a-set, begins to unravel. Their growing paranoia hints at the artifice of this illusion, as though the curtain might be figuratively pulled back at any moment. This theatricality becomes explicit when Lise and Paul attempt to interview a co-op member, only to find themselves positioned in front of a scenic backdrop—a staged representation of agrarian life (fig. 13). Through this deliberate staging, Panh critiques the regime’s political theatrics and the hollow idealism of a utopia that would never materialize. The clay figurines serve as a simulacrum of the journalists’ journey through this elaborate facade, evoking what could be described as a “socialist Truman Show horror.”
Panh, who has consistently reflected on the ethics of depicting violence, avoids directly showing scenes of killing, with the exception of Alain’s assassination in the final moments of the film. Instead, the clay figurines stand in for these moments of unimaginable horror, their stillness conveying trauma without exploiting the real suffering of victims. In this context, I draw on art historian Boreth Ly’s concept of baksbat, or the “broken body,” to interpret how these figurines embody the lingering trauma of genocide. Through this approach, Panh navigates the tension between representation and ethics, using the figurines to bear witness to collective suffering while preserving the dignity of its victims. In their anthology on Panh’s work, Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai detail his approach, termed "la parole filmée," emphasizes the importance of restoring language to the body and its attempts to make meaning.
“Really? How do you know for sure?!!” I pressed my friend Puthik further. It was hearsay, he admitted—but such is the nature of how information travels in Phnom Penh. Initially I couldn’t verify whether this was true or just pure speculation since no actor is credited for playing Pol Pot on the film’s official press materials. Even IMDB lists Pot as playing himself through archives. And while this insider knowledge further enhanced my viewing of the film with newfound resonance through Panh’s esoteric shadowplay, I questioned the omission of publicizing this casting and whether it was downplayed purposefully to detract from spoiling the film. Was it a deliberate choice to preserve the suspense? After all, much of the film's tension hinges on whether our protagonists—and by extension, we as viewers—will encounter Pol Pot, and if so, how he will be seen, heard, and rendered in historical accuracy.
Absence is a recurring motif in Rithy Panh’s body of work. While the film eschews overt depictions of grotesque violence, the emotional aftermath was palpable. My friends and I left the cinema in stunned silence. Many young viewers, whose knowledge of the Khmer Rouge era is often fragmented, turned to TikTok to express their reactions. In one video, a reviewer used the Khmer phrase bat mot bat kaw (“lost my mouth, lost my neck”) to describe being utterly speechless.
Traditional Khmer shadow theater, sbek thom, is performed at night in open spaces such as rice fields or temple courtyards (fig. 14). This natural, open-air setting creates an expansive and communal atmosphere, where narrators stand in front of the screen, guiding the audience while interacting with them. Behind the screen, performers manipulate intricate leather puppets, their shadows projected onto the illuminated canvas. Audiences typically sit on mats or directly on the ground, fostering an intimate connection to both the performance and each other.
I return to the spatial dynamics of sbek thom in my conclusion to reflect on a central question: Who was this French-language, Cambodian co-production truly for? As a Cambodian-American, I often struggle to disentangle my positionalities and biases. While the film seems to negotiate audience reception on multiple levels, I argue that its primary address is towards Western audiences. Yet, the film has also been celebrated by Khmer artists and creatives in my circle.
“Pu Rithy did not want to go easy on us,” Puthik said. “He was unforgiving.”
For Cambodian audiences, the film’s impact was deeply personal and unsettling. Yet, despite its resonance, Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot did not make the shortlist for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film—a time when meditative reflections on war's legacy feel more urgent than ever. Panh carefully balances historical drama with his auteurist flair, employing dreamlike sequences and symbolic imagery.
The Khmer word for shadow is sramol. The full name for traditional shadow theater, lakhaon sramol sbek, translates to “skin shadow theater,” referring to the leather hides used to craft the puppets. Beyond its literal meaning, sramol carries poetic and spiritual weight, evoking reflections, silhouettes, spirits, and even ancestral presences. Shadows, in this context, are not mere optical phenomena but repositories of memory and cultural meaning. In the end, Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot is not simply a film about the past; it is a profound meditation on how history’s shadows linger in the present. Through his auteurist vision and masterful deployment of cinematic shadows, Panh urges us to reckon with the persistent silhouettes of trauma. By engaging with the film’s shadow(ing), we, too, become witnesses—standing in for what is absent, searching for meaning in what remains.
END NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnes, Leslie, and Mai, Joseph, eds. The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. Accessed December 24, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Becker, Elizabeth. When the war was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution. New York : PublicAffairs, 1998.
Boyle, Deirdre. Ferryman of Memories: the Films of Rithy Panh. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2023.
Corey, Pamela N. The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021.
Kravel, Pech Tum. Sbek Thom: Khmer Shadow Theater. Edited by Martin Fellows Hatch. [Ithaca, N.Y.]: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1995.
Ly, Boreth. Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020.
Moyer, James F. “Film and the Public Memory: The Phenomena of Nonfiction Film Fragments.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 5 (2007). Digital Commons @RISD
Sharpe, William Chapman. Grasping Shadows : The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2017. Accessed December 24, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Um, Khatharya. From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
This essay examines Rithy Panh’s Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (2024) through the lens of shadow(ing) – a reframing of William Chapman Sharpe’s shadow-work – to explore how shadows operate as acts of both embodiment and witnessing. Central to this analysis is the film’s strategy of “doubling,” in which figures, spaces, and media are mirrored through archives-within-archives, sets-within-a-set, and Panh’s own casting of himself as the shadow of Pol Pot. Drawing on historical accounts by Elizabeth Becker and interweaving film theory, memory studies, and Cambodian cultural practices such as sbek thom (shadow theater), the essay situates Panh’s melding of fiction and nonfiction as a “techno-shadow” of the Khmer Rouge era. The film’s layered mise-en-scène, clay figurines, projected archival fragments, and manipulations of scale deploy shadows as political and aesthetic vessels, foregrounding absence, haunting, and the ethics of representation. By positioning shadow(ing) and doubling as auteurist strategies that collapse temporal, spatial, and affective registers, this essay argues that Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot is less a historical reconstruction than a meditation on how the persistent silhouettes of genocide shape Cambodian subjectivity and collective memory.
“For the shadow is his and the penumbra is his
and his the perplexity of the phenomenon.”
— Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, line 313
INTRODUCTION
“Did you notice, Bong?” Asked my friend Puthik, probing my attention to detail after we watched Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (Meeting with Pol Pot, 2024) at the Aeon Mall cineplex in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, “that was Pu Rithy.”
It was my first experience sitting in a theater filled entirely with other Cambodians, and I couldn’t help but take note of the audience’s reactions. Glancing over at the auntie across the row who chuckled whenever the French actors delivered Khmer lines, overhearing a couple’s whispered attempts at live-translating the subtitles[1], and witnessing the sudden moment when the audience collectively fell silent at the climatic arrival of Pol Pot—or, his shadowy presence—appearing on screen. In this film, unlike in earlier conventional depictions that relied on archival footage, Pot is not rendered as a fully visible figure. Instead, filmmaker Rithy Panh traced the silhouette of the former Khmer Rouge leader to obfuscate this corporeal encounter and further subverted it by casting himself as the shadow of Pol Pot.
This essay argues that Panh’s self-casting as Pol Pot’s shadow turns “shadow(ing)” into a double practice—embodiment for performers and witnessing for audiences—through intermedial archives and sets-within-sets that produce a techno-shadow of Khmer Rouge memory.
For literary scholar William Chapman Sharpe, “shadow-work” is the unconscious processing of shadows in life and art that we unknowingly do all the time.[2] The persistent uncertainty of whether a shadow is Self or Other is a tension that’s at the core of Panh’s destabilizing embodiment of Pol Pot. In the filmmaker’s “return to fiction”, Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot follows three French journalists who are invited to Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 to witness for themselves the Khmer Rouge regime’s claims of utopia. Their sojourn unravels as deception and paranoia surfaces to reveal a revolution rapidly in decline. Photographer Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï) mysteriously disappears. As the war intensifies and fear of an approaching Vietnamese incursion, the remaining journalists Lise Delbo (Irène Jacob) and Alain Cariou (Cyril Gueï) are taken to meet Pol Pot at his hideout in Phnom Penh where they finally conduct an interview. With horrors of war and genocide hidden in plain sight, the film ends with an assassination and a grim allegorical note on the folly of political ideologues.
Firsthand accounts from the book When the War Was Over by American journalist Elizabeth Becker became the blueprint for Panh’s Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot. Becker had been reporting on armed conflict in Southeast Asia since 1973 and was one of the few Westerners—along with academic Malcolm Caldwell and journalist Richard Dudman (inspiration for the characters Alain and Paul, respectively)—invited to tour Democratic Kampuchea just before the Khmer Rouge collapsed in 1979.
Above all, the film’s political overtones largely focus on the role of journalism. For Panh, “the aim” of the film was to “question the role of the journalist in the field, which is tending to disappear.” Viewers are taken on a journey in time as witnesses, literally and figuratively, through the lens of journalism. I argue however that the deployment of key aesthetic and historical slippages (which are ahistorical, and at times, magical) in the film are overlooked and undervalued in their capacities to “make sense” of the realities of war in its reconciliation of fragmentary memory and history. Pol Pot’s phantasmagorical shadow becomes a capacious vessel for political meaning-making, embodying the “nothingness” of absence while still being “here” and “there”—an encapsulation of the persisent hauntings of war and genocide among survivors and within Cambodian subjectivity at large.
Drawing on the multivalent properties of shadows as literal and figurative phenomenologies, this essay reframes Sharpe’s “shadow-work” as “shadow(ing)” to constitute an assemblage of interconnected political, cultural, and linguistic materials to help us better understand shadow’s potential in reading and analyzing the work of Rithy Panh. “Shadow(ing)”—as opposed to “shadow-work”—underscores the auteurist nature of Panh’s filmmaking and the aesthetic idiosyncrasies of his memory-storytelling. In Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot, specifically, his intermedial use of archives (archives-within-an-archive) and his layered mise-en-scène (sets-within-a-set) demonstrate “shadow(ing)” as repetition and its (im)material relationality between shadow, source, and surface. Borrowing from the work of film theorist James F. Moyer (2007), I situate cinematic memory as a “techno-shadow,” a term I use to describe the cinematic techniques analogous to shadowy properties: projection, absent, unconscious, depth, passive, dependent on light, and an extension of the self (and in this case, of history). To this end, I zone in on Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot to theorize how the film's seamless melding of fictional and nonfictional fragments piece together to constitute a techno-shadow of this particular dark history. I take this a step further to claim that “shadow(ing)” is an act of both embodying (for the actors) and witnessing (for the audience)—standing-in for what is absent to redirect our gaze to the source.
SHADOW REALMS AND MEDIASCAPES
Resisting the urge to follow the established analysis of this film's political themes, I instead focus on how visual strategies are employed to craft atmosphere and space, creating what I perceive as a "shadow realm" through the director's world-building. Viscerally unnerving, Rithy Panh’s Rendezvous avec Pol Pot is all about “shadow(ing)” and how it shapes the psychology and mood of the film. From the way scenes transition from day-to-night, creating atmospheric tensions that shift between sun-soaked paranoia and evening silences. The film’s setting in 1978 Democratic Kampuchea, as author and journalist Elizabeth Becker (the real-life counterpart to Irène Jacob’s character Lise Delbo) aptly describes in her book, “was like walking into the Twilight Zone” of Cambodia. Particularly during the last half-hour of the film when our protagonists are led to Phnom Penh—the city is completely abandoned and reduced to a ghostly shell—the shadows of the modernist buildings take on a haunting presence, culminating in a surreal moment of magical realism that I will later explore in this section.
The film opens with a shadow—the silhouette of an airplane flying through an overcast sky carrying our three French journalists (Fig. 5). Panh, as in many of his earlier films such as Bophana (1996), begins with black-and-white video that transitions into color, signaling temporal crossings and the blurred boundary between his camera and found footage. Aerial views of miles-long lines of rice fields, enclosed by lush mountainous forests, are interspersed with interior shots of the journalists on the plane: Alain reading a book, Lise filming from a window, Paul fidgeting. Upon second viewing, we realize that the landscape shots are a combination of archival and contemporary footage along with miniature sets, which will become a recurring motif in the staging and mise en scène. From the start, we enter Panh’s (techno-)shadow realm of history and cinema, of past and present, oscillating on the 4:3 ratio screen as if to affirm the seamless intertwinement of fiction and documentary.
We are acquainted with the charismatic Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), who is inspired by real-life Scottish academic and prolific Marxist writer Malcolm Caldwell, who, having been one of the staunchest defenders of Pol Pot, suffered a similar and unfortunate fate as his character. Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï) a Black, Ivorian-French photographer, is the analogue of Becker’s other accompanied guest, American journalist Richard Dudman who spent much of his career reporting on authoritarianism, war, and revolutions in the global south. Paul is the most cantankerous of the group—unwilling to play by the regime’s games. Panh imagined him, similar to Dudman, as someone who “had already covered many other conflicts and photographed other countries in the grip of dictatorship,” suggesting his character is the most clear-eyed due to this. Lise Delbo (Panh’s tribute to Holocaust survivor and memoirist Charlotte Delbo) is of course Elizabeth Becker. She inhabits a quiet composure and is the empathetic intermediary between Paul and Alain, who respond differently to the revolutionaries.
They arrive stranded on a vacant and desolate landing strip. Already, Lise is unnerved and lights a cigarette: “we’re not at Pochentong.” The trio deduce they are in the rural northwest as they are soon greeted by a caravan of armed soldiers and comrade Sung (Bun-Hok Lim). Sung, who is Minister of Foreign Affairs and is their French guide and translator, urges the Westerners to call him “comrade” (in Khmer, they use the word mitt – meaning “friend”). Despite comrade Sung’s mild-mannered and “civilized” demeanor, Lise divulges to her colleagues that he’s “just as cruel as the others.”
The trio are driven to an undisclosed military post (I surmise Battambang for its idyllic rural province and made popular by golden age singer Sinn Sisamouth). Arriving at a brutalist, concrete building heavily guarded with soldiers and adorned with communist paraphernalia—the three take their first steps into what Panh describes as a “Potemkin village”. The journalists are supervised at all times during their visit on highly-curated tours of a new Kampuchean society. The film doesn’t take long to break the facade of the regime’s revolution. On their first day, we witness iconoclasm and propaganda art, restriction against photographing farmers/citizens, an interview with Ieng Thirith (Somaline Mao), a historical figure and influential member of the party, who offers inconsistent answers to the “mysterious” civilian deaths reported by refugees. This charade occurs conspicuously during the daytime under a climate of perpetual tropical heat. The film’s color balance of warm yellow, oranges, and green, reproduces the sensuous atmospheric air of Cambodian weather but contradicts these common conceptions and ideas around “light” as a symbol of truth and life.
“We’re all alone in this crazy place. We need to help each other,” says Paul to Lise during a nighttime encounter. We first witness moments of intimacy, care, and reflection when the journalists retire to their rooms and share liquor, smoke cigarettes, read, write, and exchange secrets. Lise is secretly carrying cash, in hopes to give it to her friend Bophana. In the dark shadows of the evening, there is an opportunity, away from the regime, to truly be themselves. This moment echoes what Becker details in her experience of her visit as “travel[ing] in a bubble” and no one being allowed to “speak to [her] freely.”
One striking visual cue in this night scene is how clearly the silhouettes of Lise and Paul’s shadows are filmed (fig. 6-7), perhaps foreshadowing the anticipated meeting with Pol Pot. Across the eventide of empty landscapes and deserted buildings, these nighttime scenes serve as transitioning points in storytelling where crucial events occur at night that alters the plot irrevocably: disappearances and deaths that go unseen.
In the final thirty minutes of the film, the characters relocate to Phnom Penh, and a peculiar nighttime scene unfolds where intermedial fragments of archival imagery take center stage. After her interview with regime leader Pol Pot is abruptly cut short, Lise Delbo travels with Khmer Rouge soldiers in the back of a military truck en route to a temporary guesthouse. Suddenly and without hesitation, she brazenly runs off. This moment parallels Elizabeth Becker’s own account of disbelief upon seeing Phnom Penh completely evacuated—a realization she described as only sinking in when she witnessed it firsthand. What is Lise searching for? Perhaps Bophana? Perhaps anybody. Or, is this what Panh wanted to portray as an exemplar of journalistic integrity and courage: in the field and searching for answers at any cost. Against the backdrop of a decaying cityscape, “aloneness” and loss of self become themes revisited—having been consistently explored in Panh’s earlier works. For viewers of the film, we get a tiny glimpse of that experience via the surrogacy of the actors performance, of the systemic alienation of the Khmer Rouge. This social death was marked by the severing of human connections and the destruction of social bonds that provide coherence, meaning, and purpose to one's life.
Wandering alone through the dark and desolate streets of Phnom Penh, Lise enters an abandoned building, unsure of what she might find. Inside, a forgotten tea set sits untouched, and bats flutter out of a window at the sudden presence of a human. Bathed in moonlit shadows, she steps into a room where the melody of a pinpeat orchestra fills the air. On the concrete wall, a video is projected, showing elders offering incense and scattering flowers at a wedding, followed by scenes of people dancing in celebration (Fig. 8). Lise sifts through family photographs of strangers, her movements slow and deliberate, before the camera cuts to a montage of archival footage showing a ransacked and emptied home.
This sequence exemplifies Panh’s plea for engaging with the “afterlives of the archives.” In what can be thought of as “shadow-work” or “shadow(ing),” the filmmaker engages with the capacious materiality of archives to open up spaces of witness and memorialization, but also recovery. Beyond documenting atrocities, but to preserve photographic evidence of one’s self and one’s dignity. Across Panh’s oeuvre, the dignity of the victims and survivors are paramount. As Panh himself has stated, “Genocide is not only killings; it is not only deaths. It is much more than that. It is the complete destruction and deprivation of our culture and our identity.” It is through this shadowy evening scene that Panh’s case for cinema, filmmaking, art and culture becomes presently evident.
Situating this encounter inside the shell of an abandoned home gestures towards contemporary issues in Phnom Penh, such as the rapid pace of urban development and the demolition of historically and artistically significant spaces like the White Building. Here, architectural space becomes a witness to history, a silent testament to severed human connections and fractured families. As I watch this scene in Phnom Penh, I realize – empty home serves as a metaphor for loss, its shadowy presence a surface through which Lise bears witness to the beforelives and afterlives of the victims. The city of Phnom Penh is portrayed as a shadow, an archive, one that has seen bodies come and go and is able to hold onto those traces.
RE-STAGING HISTORY: ARCHIVES WITHIN ARCHIVE
Scholar Pamela Corey, whose extensive research exploring the intersection of contemporary art and urban intervention in Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City, offers a critical reconceptualization of scale. Corey’s framework becomes useful in analyzing Panh’s idiosyncratic use of clay figurines which has now become a signature of the filmmaker with Rendezvous avec Pol Pot marking his third collaboration with artist Sarith Mang, following L’Image manquante (The Missing Picture, 2013) and Everything Will Be OK (2022). Applying Corey’s conceptual apparatus of “scale” in human geography which identifies the relationality of power, control, and resistance, allows us to answer, “why little clay figurines?” Drawing on Sallie Marston’s definition of scale as “a level of representation” and “a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents,” Corey situates scale as a critical tool for understanding contemporary art practices. She highlights how Cambodian artists employ their bodies and performances to symbolically engage with multiple scales of interaction—ranging from the urban and national to the regional.
In Panh’s case, one can easily make the connection of scaling through the manipulation of camera positioning, which shifts and zooms fluidly between macro and micro perspectives. However, beyond adjusting size or perspective, the filmmaker uses scale as a critical tool to address and intertwine global discourses in nuanced ways. It is not a coincidence that in this film there are wide-angle shots of desolate lush landscapes that linger, to foreground the “aloneness” that Khatharya Um had articulated in Cambodian subjecthood, but could also likely intersect with contemporary issues of deforestation, land degradation, land rights, and displacements of indigenous communities. I argue that Panh speaks through multiple modes through a centralizing motif because of the natural intersectionality and interconnectedness of these issues: war, genocide, development, class divide, authoritarianism, climate crises. These themes are not isolated; rather, they are interconnected, forming a web of systemic violence and survival. Thus, the question is not why Panh uses scale to address these intersecting issues, but how he does so. And to what effect?
In L’Image manquante, Panh’s Academy Award-nominated documentary, the filmmaker expressed his intent clearly—signaled in the very title of the film. Reflecting on his process, he said, “And I think to tell the story, it’s good to work with your hand, with your heart, with clay, with water, with the sun, you know, to dry it, come to work with the elements of life.” It is through the absence of a visual documentation that Panh began incorporating the clay figurines but also to investigate the archival status of the earth as a medium and metaphor for documenting the Cambodian disaster. Jennifer Cazenave touches on clay’s potential as materials of mourning as well as the environmental implications of Pol Pot’s failed agrarian utopia. The stillness of the clay figurines (fig. 9-10) is particularly haunting, as they seem to embody frozen moments in time, evoking the filmmaker’s role as a kind of time traveler bearing witness to lives interrupted.
While the logic of using clay figurines to reenact a “missing picture” feels apt for a documentary, their inclusion in a fictionalized narrative such as Rendezvous avec Pol Pot raises deeper questions. Why extend this visual language into a non-documentary context? In one pivotal scene, Lise wanders through an abandoned home in Phnom Penh, encountering traces of memory through family photographs and projected archival footage. Similarly, Paul, the Black French photographer, encounters the archives through his camera lens in an especially striking moment. In this instance, multiple layers of archival media interface (fig. 11): Paul stands before a miniature clay set depicting an agrarian scene, while behind him, a projection of archival footage shows the mass forced evacuation to the countryside. This is just one of numerous examples of Panh playing with archives and colliding them in what I call archives-within-an-archive and sets-within-a-set, as an act of “shadow(ing).”
Corey’s concept of “scale,” particularly as it relates to power, presence, and site, is most vividly realized in an early scene where Comrade Sung escorts the three journalists to a warehouse. Within, artisans labor to produce propaganda art while repurposing metal scraps from Western cars into farming tools. Towering portraits of Pol Pot are in various stages of completion, accompanied by scenic paintings of rural Cambodia and Marxist-Leninist-inspired history paintings. This scene visually underscores how scale operates under the regime’s ideological vision, with artists compelled to reimagine an agrarian utopia that embodies the regime’s propaganda.
The clay figurine sets are introduced in a scene where a comrade is confused by Sung’s suggestion to demolish Wat Phnom in place of a sculpture of Brother Number One (fig. 12). Throughout the film, we begin to see how the regime’s “Potemkin village,” which encloses sets-within-a-set, begins to unravel. Their growing paranoia hints at the artifice of this illusion, as though the curtain might be figuratively pulled back at any moment. This theatricality becomes explicit when Lise and Paul attempt to interview a co-op member, only to find themselves positioned in front of a scenic backdrop—a staged representation of agrarian life (fig. 13). Through this deliberate staging, Panh critiques the regime’s political theatrics and the hollow idealism of a utopia that would never materialize. The clay figurines serve as a simulacrum of the journalists’ journey through this elaborate facade, evoking what could be described as a “socialist Truman Show horror.”
Panh, who has consistently reflected on the ethics of depicting violence, avoids directly showing scenes of killing, with the exception of Alain’s assassination in the final moments of the film. Instead, the clay figurines stand in for these moments of unimaginable horror, their stillness conveying trauma without exploiting the real suffering of victims. In this context, I draw on art historian Boreth Ly’s concept of baksbat, or the “broken body,” to interpret how these figurines embody the lingering trauma of genocide. Through this approach, Panh navigates the tension between representation and ethics, using the figurines to bear witness to collective suffering while preserving the dignity of its victims. In their anthology on Panh’s work, Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai detail his approach, termed "la parole filmée," emphasizes the importance of restoring language to the body and its attempts to make meaning.
“Really? How do you know for sure?!!” I pressed my friend Puthik further. It was hearsay, he admitted—but such is the nature of how information travels in Phnom Penh. Initially I couldn’t verify whether this was true or just pure speculation since no actor is credited for playing Pol Pot on the film’s official press materials. Even IMDB lists Pot as playing himself through archives. And while this insider knowledge further enhanced my viewing of the film with newfound resonance through Panh’s esoteric shadowplay, I questioned the omission of publicizing this casting and whether it was downplayed purposefully to detract from spoiling the film. Was it a deliberate choice to preserve the suspense? After all, much of the film's tension hinges on whether our protagonists—and by extension, we as viewers—will encounter Pol Pot, and if so, how he will be seen, heard, and rendered in historical accuracy.
Absence is a recurring motif in Rithy Panh’s body of work. While the film eschews overt depictions of grotesque violence, the emotional aftermath was palpable. My friends and I left the cinema in stunned silence. Many young viewers, whose knowledge of the Khmer Rouge era is often fragmented, turned to TikTok to express their reactions. In one video, a reviewer used the Khmer phrase bat mot bat kaw (“lost my mouth, lost my neck”) to describe being utterly speechless.
Traditional Khmer shadow theater, sbek thom, is performed at night in open spaces such as rice fields or temple courtyards (fig. 14). This natural, open-air setting creates an expansive and communal atmosphere, where narrators stand in front of the screen, guiding the audience while interacting with them. Behind the screen, performers manipulate intricate leather puppets, their shadows projected onto the illuminated canvas. Audiences typically sit on mats or directly on the ground, fostering an intimate connection to both the performance and each other.
I return to the spatial dynamics of sbek thom in my conclusion to reflect on a central question: Who was this French-language, Cambodian co-production truly for? As a Cambodian-American, I often struggle to disentangle my positionalities and biases. While the film seems to negotiate audience reception on multiple levels, I argue that its primary address is towards Western audiences. Yet, the film has also been celebrated by Khmer artists and creatives in my circle.
“Pu Rithy did not want to go easy on us,” Puthik said. “He was unforgiving.”
For Cambodian audiences, the film’s impact was deeply personal and unsettling. Yet, despite its resonance, Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot did not make the shortlist for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film—a time when meditative reflections on war's legacy feel more urgent than ever. Panh carefully balances historical drama with his auteurist flair, employing dreamlike sequences and symbolic imagery.
The Khmer word for shadow is sramol. The full name for traditional shadow theater, lakhaon sramol sbek, translates to “skin shadow theater,” referring to the leather hides used to craft the puppets. Beyond its literal meaning, sramol carries poetic and spiritual weight, evoking reflections, silhouettes, spirits, and even ancestral presences. Shadows, in this context, are not mere optical phenomena but repositories of memory and cultural meaning. In the end, Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot is not simply a film about the past; it is a profound meditation on how history’s shadows linger in the present. Through his auteurist vision and masterful deployment of cinematic shadows, Panh urges us to reckon with the persistent silhouettes of trauma. By engaging with the film’s shadow(ing), we, too, become witnesses—standing in for what is absent, searching for meaning in what remains.
END NOTES
- The film’s dialogue is mostly in French with some Khmer. The version in Cambodia theaters featured English subtitles only.
-
Akin to how our unconscious mind processes dreams (as Freud termed "dream-work"), but instead focuses on the intuitive understanding of shadows. From William Chapman Sharpe’s Grasping Shadows (Oxford University Press, 2017)
- Ibid., 36
- While the film is categorized as “fiction”, Panh himself does not like to distinguish between documentary/fiction, and says “in my fiction, there is always a documentary gesture.” Catherine Dussart Production (CDP), 2024. Meeting with Pol Pot English Press Kit. https://cdn-medias.festival-cannes.com/uploads/2024/05/174046.pdf
- Ibid., 4
- Sara Pol-Lim and Charles L. Slater did extensive qualitative research examining the effects of parent historical trauma on their children in the article “Understanding Parental Historical Trauma and the Effect on Second-Generation Cambodian Americans” (Journal of Loss and Trauma, Volume 29, 2024, Issue 6), https://doi.org/10.1080/15325024.2024.2331735
- Borrowing from Deleuze's concept of assemblage (or agencement)
- Ibid., 5 - Meeting with Pol Pot English Press Kit
- The former name of Phnom Penh international airport
- Linguistic anthropologist Cheryl Yin discusses the Khmer Rouge’s eradication of informal pronouns and changes to the words “I” and “you” in this CKS virtual talk titled “Why is God angry?”, at the 1hr 2min mark. https://youtu.be/kIMOWatGO3k?si=IYH2eF2qZoxDyqwE&t=3749
- A Potemkin village refers to a deceptive façade or impressive illusion designed to conceal an undesirable reality. The term originates from a legend about Grigory Potemkin, a Russian nobleman and lover of Empress Catherine the Great. According to the story, during Catherine's visit to Crimea in 1787, Potemkin supposedly constructed fake villages along her route to give the impression of prosperity and success in the recently annexed region. While historians debate the accuracy of this tale, the phrase has endured as a metaphor for any superficial or misleading appearance created to impress outsiders.
- Western framing from literature and the Enlightenment Era, the name signaling as a “dispelling of darkness”
- In reference to the same historical person in Panh’s acclaimed documentary, suggesting a sense of soft “world-building” between fictional and nonfictional people across his filmography.
- Khatharya Um writes about this in a film analysis for another Panh film, Exile, about the effects of the genocide on diasporic subjects. Her article The Wounds of Memory was part of Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai’s anthology The Cinema of Rithy Panh : Everything Has a Soul (Rutgers University Press, 2021).
- Ibid., 49
- Rithy Panh, “Rithy Panh on Film Preservation and the Importance of Memory,” interview by Frako Loden, International Documentary Association, November 19, 2014, https://www.documentary.org/feature/rithy-panh-film-preservation-and-importance-memory
- Panh confirmed that he played Pot in an interview with Hindustan Times: https://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/others/cambodian-director-rithy-panh-on-meeting-with-pol-pot-cannes-film-festival-101716109808873.html
- This is my friend Rotanak who shared this TikTok review of the film, in Khmer language: https://www.tiktok.com/@rithbonrotanak/video/7402258171810680082?_r=1&_t=8rUEfYijlj7
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnes, Leslie, and Mai, Joseph, eds. The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. Accessed December 24, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Becker, Elizabeth. When the war was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution. New York : PublicAffairs, 1998.
Boyle, Deirdre. Ferryman of Memories: the Films of Rithy Panh. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2023.
Corey, Pamela N. The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021.
Kravel, Pech Tum. Sbek Thom: Khmer Shadow Theater. Edited by Martin Fellows Hatch. [Ithaca, N.Y.]: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1995.
Ly, Boreth. Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020.
Moyer, James F. “Film and the Public Memory: The Phenomena of Nonfiction Film Fragments.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 5 (2007). Digital Commons @RISD
Sharpe, William Chapman. Grasping Shadows : The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2017. Accessed December 24, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Um, Khatharya. From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
