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Rating: We must return to the purity of the rice grain. (Pol Pot, Brother No. 1)
Only agreement, however, for the other film in competition of the day, "The Rice People" by Rithy Panh: restrained applause, the kind that seals boring concerts. (Kezich Tullio, correspondent from the Cannes Festival - Page 33 (May 21, 1994) - Corriere della Sera)
Yong Poew the head of the family. Yin Om the mother. Seven daughters, theirs is a peasant family.
The cycle of their lives is marked by the cycle of rice cultivation.
Yong Poew dies, the wife goes mad, but life does not wait, the rice field must continue to be cultivated.
Rithy Panh, a Cambodian director, who survived the extermination camps, sought refuge in Thailand and then in Paris; tells this story in his first feature film that is a painfully intimate and at the same time extreme film. Intimate in showing the unfolding of this daily affair that on a personal level draws inspiration from the memory of his youth, and extreme because in the succession of tragic events that will strike this farming family there will be a metaphorical shift from the small and restricted story of this family unit to the larger and more complicated history of an entire nation.
The foundation of the director's entire poetics is indeed the idea of recovering the lost memory of his nation, from this quest to preserve memory, both his own personal and that of his people, stems the need for this film: "a film to find oneself again, to finally understand that one has managed to overcome, at least in part, the trauma", he would say in one of his many interviews.
The whole film flows through two main levels of interpretation, the first being the basic and real vision of the story, the daily life of a peasant family; but every passage of it can have a double metaphorical reference:
The death of the father / the "death" of the old social, traditional, cultural conception of Cambodia.
The madness of the mother / a people finding themselves without reference points and getting lost.
The rare courage and dignity of the eldest daughter / the courage and dignity with which a people have begun to live (or survive).
All this in the film is supported by a central pivot; the dream of the dying father, where for a moment the Khmer Rouge appear, whom in an ancient prophecy of Buddha the Cambodians identify as the black crows.
Imagining this story without a precise temporal reference, that dream could be a memory of the past or a prophecy, because everything concerning existence for the Cambodians is cyclical: life with its reincarnations, rice cultivation, peace, and war; everything that has happened will happen again.
In the end, we are left with a sense of moral solitude, and ideally we find ourselves like Yin Om, in the middle of the rice fields in search of imaginary figures, like an entire generation that lived through the years of war and finds itself lost wandering in a nation in constant change and development, but without having regained its memory.
Preserve the memory of Cambodia. The country cannot be rebuilt without recreating a memory, a culture, the bases of its own identity. (Rithy Panh)
The wise man knows that life is just a flame shaken by a violent wind. (Writing present on the architrave of a door of Angkor)
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