IRRADIES

France, 2020, 88 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Rithy Panh.

The director of this film comes from Cambodia and has made films there. He also has the collaboration of French actors who serve as narrators. The focus is especially on Asia and on Japan which gave support to this project.

The intention of the film is to reflect on war and its consequences, the effect on human beings, suffering, illness, death. The intention is to have audiences alert, even shocked, invited to meditate, encouraging their sense of hope – or reinforce a sense of despair.

The film is really a cinema essay, lasting almost 90 minutes which require some attention from the audience, something of an endurance. It chooses and highlight the themes of violence, war, the effect on people, man’s inhumanity to man. The audience is invited to observe, share the perspective of the filmmakers, empathise with the victims, share the pain of torture and death. And there is constant emphasis on weapons and their power for destruction, especially nuclear weapons, the focus on Hiroshima principally as well as on Nagasaki. Visuals of the atomic bomb and its aftermath?

Because it is a cinema poem, with commentary, it is a series of selected images, edited for pace and effect, thematic links, interrupted, recurring? And, at times, the film goes cosmic in its images.

So, memories of war, Europe in World War II, the concentration camps, memories of Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the focus of the atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender. This is a film and a cinema poem and essay of revelation and contemplation.