Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh's adaptation of "The Sea Wall" out in French cinemas

By Stéphanie Gée Courtesy of Ka-Set
6th January, 2009
Ream (Cambodia, Kampong Som), 17/11/2007. Rithy Panh, director of "The Sea Wall", an adaptation of Marguerite Duras' novel © John Vink / Magnum After a first film adaptation of the famous novel entitled The Sea Wall (Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique) by French film director René Clément, the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh decided to take over by adapting it to the big screen too. The piece is one of the French author Marguerite Duras' first novels and contributed to bring her to fame some 58 years ago. And the film, starring French actress Isabelle Huppert, recently appointed president of the jury for the next Cannes cinema festival (held in France from May 13th to May 24th 2009) and young actors Gaspard Ulliel and Astrid Berges-Fisbey, is out in French cinemas on January 7th. In the documentary film Uncle Rithy (2009) directed by Jean-Marie Barbe and introducing Rithy Panh himself, the latter explained his wish to appropriate Marguerite Duras' masterpiece, which he is particularly fond of. He decided to do so but focused on one main matter: what can a Cambodian filmmaker possibly add to this text, and how can he interpret it, considering his own experience, that of a Cambodian man who survived the Khmer Rouge regime and found refuge in France before obtaining a diploma at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) in Paris? By directing this film, Rithy Panh went back to pure fiction, after having supervised a series of documentary films over the past few years, all dealing with the process of remembrance (S-21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2004), The Burnt Theatre (2005), Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise ("Paper cannot wrap up embers")(2007)). The film adaptation of The Sea Wall, set in the South of Cambodia in the national park of Ream, which offers stunning natural scenes, draws its main story from the female novelist's memories as a young woman. The 1930s. In Southern French Indochina, against a backdrop of colonial system criticism, the shady character of a mother, inspired by Duras' own mother, struggles against the elements and corrupt civil servants working for land registry services. The mother, starred by Isabelle Huppert and the core character of the story, is in charge of a frail equilibrium revolving around her and tries as much as she can to maintain it. The colonial administration tricked her by making her sign a land concession on the Gulf of Siam, a piece of land which is actually highly liable to flooding and on which nothing can possibly grow. Weary and angry, the character experiences a gradual descent into madness, torn and suffering in the middle of waves of contradictions. But with the energy generated by despair, she sets out to launch an impossible project to fight the fickle tides of the ocean. Having lost a huge amount of savings in her bad business investment, the austere widow regains enough strength and willpower to assert her intention to save her land and that of other Cambodian farmers living in the village from flooding... by building a sea wall. An outsider in the colonial society, completely ruined, the mother, trying to stop her children Joseph (20 years old) and Suzanne (16 years old) from leaving the nest, accepts to let Mr Jo, a rich Chinese businessman, court Suzanne,- a compromise she made out of a need for money to sustain the small disorientated family torn by the destructive bonds of passion created over the years. Back then, Mrs Donnadieu, Marguerite Duras' mother, may have failed in her enterprise to tame the high tides which regularly flood the area from October to February and turn the soil into toxic and unusable land. Probably due to a lack of financial and technical means... But engineers commissioned by the French Protectorate in the 1930s and more recently by the French Agency for Development (AFD) - the financial tool of French cooperation - together with the help of other partners, did finally succeed in making the project come true. In the meantime, between these two consistent projects, the building of dams and land drainage works were more or less abandoned but ambitious works for the redevelopment of six polders in Prey Nup, in the municipality of Sihanoukville were started in 1998 and finally completed eight years later. All in all, the projects required three funding sources from the AFD, as pointed out by the French embassy in Cambodia on its website. Today, thanks to the rehabilitation of 55 miles of dams and 80 miles of canals, around 10,000 families can benefit from some 10,000 ha of ricelands. These massive improvements allowed the average annual rice yield to go from 1.5 tonne per ha to 2.7 tonnes per ha. A Community of polder users was even set up, which makes it a pilot-project, in order to ensure the maintenance and management of the rehabilitated structures and collect fees from families who own a piece of land. The mother's dreams eventually came true... Also on Ka-set Multimedia Slideshow about the shooting of Rithy Panh's film entitled "The Sea Wall".