Rice People(HKAFF 2019)

While made entirely with European funds, Rice People is the one film which propelled Cambodian cinema to global attention. The first Cambodian film to make its bow at the Cannes Film Festival, Rithy Panh's first fictional feature is centred around a farming family whose impoverished lives were tipped further towards the precipice when the patriarch dies. Now solely responsible for the family's livelihood, the mother (played by the excellent Peng Phan) becomes increasingly agitated, her paranoia soon leading to a tragic confrontation with her seven daughters. A visually mesmerising account of the struggle for survival in Cambodia's rural hinterlands, Rice People consolidates Panh – whose family perished under the Khmer Rouge – as the chronicler of Cambodia's traumatised national psyche, a mission he continued all the way to the very present with films such as One Evening After the War and the Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture.