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" I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot. "

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" We must be capable of writing our own history. "

" The most beautiful thing in Cambodia isn't the country - it's the Cambodian people. "

" With 'The Missing Picture,' we'd shot for a year and a half already when this idea of the clay figurine, the life that comes from the earth, came to me, and I changed everything. "

" Every day, do small gestures of generosity! It does not mean go to Cambodia. Do it at home. If you do nothing at home, evil becomes normal. "

" Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself. "

" I wasn't predestined to be a filmmaker; this wasn't an obvious choice to me. "

" When we pray to Buddha, we are not praying to a piece of stone, an image of Buddha, but we pray to the soul of Buddha behind the piece of stone. The souls of the people who are dead now are still with us. "

" When the Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh, the first thing they did was to evacuate the population. Then they took over. The point of a revolution is to bring justice to the people, so even if you don't have proof of sabotage, you manufacture it. "

" I left Cambodia when I was 12 or 13. I didn't really escape, but I needed to go away. "

" 'The Missing Picture' is about my story and my parents. Before this film, I never said 'I' in a film, so it is very personal. "

" As children, we did not have toys. We invented characters and animals; we invented stories. "

" In all of my films, there is a desire to testify, to interrogate the past. "

" A country cannot develop without a strong identity. "

" It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future. "

" Cannes or Oscars is not only to bring happiness and recognition - they protect people like me. The world knows who you are. You can work. You can express. You can help other people. It's not only the star system. It's a symbol of freedom. "

" We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz. "

" Film is subjective, and we must be careful with that. The kinds of films I love are those that observe, and I give possibility for people to talk. No need for me to tell people what to think - even when I make a film like 'S-21.' It's only one point of view. It's still a film; it's not a tribunal. "

" Part of the Khmer Rouge project was not only to destroy individual people, but to destroy the very notion of the individual. I want to simply rebuild the stories of people - it's part of my fight against the Khmer Rouge agenda. "

" Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story. "

" When I do feature films, I usually have a very strong sense of what I want to do. I have topics and subjects, so I go for it. I even know technically what I want to. But in the case of documentary, the story comes to me. "

" Art is giving to what you create a soul. "

" To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can't write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content. "

" I have never been political in a partisan sense. "

" The Khmer Rouge tried to delete everything. They tried to erase our past, our personality, our land, our sentiment. What we tried to do in 'The Missing Picture' was to reconstruct our identity, to bring it back to the people through cinema. "

" I am lucky to be a film director. I can create, express. It proves that I am still alive and the Khmer Rouge did not succeed in destroying me. "

" 'The Missing Picture' came together slowly, after much provocation and by refusing different forms, until I finally found the right form. "

" I love when you get the feeling of some social reality with a fictional film. "

" When you screen a film like 'The Missing Picture,' it is not like watching TV. Watching TV is very solitary. When you watch cinema, you watch it together, and you talk about it after the screening. "

" Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot - this side and not the other side. In cinema, there's one truth - not 'the truth.' It's only 'my point of view.' Cinema is powerful because of that. "

" When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything. "