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" '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. "

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" Clay is a very interesting and fundamental material: it's earth, it's water, and - with fire - it takes on form and life. "

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

" In this era of digital special effects, I think it's good to work with our hands and our hearts, to use water and clay, to dry it in the air from the sun. This brings you back to the element of life. "

" What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch 'S21,' it's a form; 'Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell' is a different proposal. "

" Art is freedom. If you defend art, you defend freedom. "

" It's better to live a world where you can hear different languages and sensibilities. "

" A country cannot develop without a strong identity. "

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

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

" I have only one life, and I can't do all. If I do one thing well, I'm happy. "

" Evil has always been here since the world began. Good is what is difficult. It is a work of every day. "

" We need a peaceful, modern Cambodia. We need to achieve that. It's not easy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To find money to make a film, you have to write maybe 50 pages to explain what you'd like to do, what the film will be, but everybody lies. Because he doesn't know what the film will be. Everybody writes 50 pages and sends it to a TV channel, a producer, to get money, but everybody lies. Or else your film is not interesting. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Evil has always been there; it's always a part of us. Evil is no big surprise. But what about the people who gave freely, who stood up for human dignity? Even in the most extreme and terrible situations, these acts of dignity existed. And for me, that is the banality of good. "

" Of course, when you're making a documentary, you don't have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room. "

" I love archival films very much. I spent thousands of hours watching archive footage. Every time I see it, I see something. Sometimes I think I know this footage, but two years later, I see it again, and I see something new. "

" I never want to be a film director - I want to be a teacher. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Pain is handed down from one generation to the next. "

" People of my generation did not like very much to tell what we lived through during the Khmer Rouge regime. "

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

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