Les artistes du Théâtre Brûlé (The Burnt Theatre). 2005. Cambodia/France. Directed by Rithy Panh. Screenplay by Panh and Agnès Sénémaud. DCP. In Khmer, French; English subtitles. 82 min.
Having withstood the Pol Pot dictatorship and the imprisonment and murder of Cambodia’s entire culture class, the Preah Suramarit National Theatre met its demise in a fire during a renovation in 1994. Today, the theater’s charred husk lies in the shadow of a new hyper-capitalist Phnom Penh of casinos, shopping malls, hotel resorts, and landfills of tossed-off consumerism. This is the ghostly setting for Rithy Panh’s theatrical stagings with the artists of the Burnt Theatre, a bewitching blur of fiction and autobiography in which actors, dancers, and shadow puppeteers incorporate their own traumas and present-day hardships into their performances of Apsara classical dance and adaptations of Cyrano and Chekhov. “We are in the process of losing our memory,” Panh has observed. “Cambodia is a land of broken dreams. There is no more theater, no more playhouses." Courtesy INA