Funan (Do, 2018)

> Date Seen: 14th November 2018 <

-Spoilers Alert-

The film is a powerful 2D animation following a family torn apart during the Khmer Rouge revolution and their struggle to survive and find one another again.

I got to see this film as part of the Manchester Animation Festival 2018 where it was screened in it’s original French language with English subtitles, which is highly important to feel the film just as it was meant to be and keeping those emotions that the film portrays regardless of the need to read subtitles.

The animation itself is beautiful as it takes you right into the action of the story, with these bold clear characters and wonderful lighting to the frames that tells the mood immediately.

Before this film I didn’t know much about Funan and the Khmer Rouge that is why this film is so important. It is based in Cambodia in 1975 and many people went through the things that happen in this film [with the statistics actually shown at the end of the film]. It is emotional, raw and powerful. A film that sticks with you and it should as a warning of what would never happen again – but atrocities like this seem to always repeat with humans.

This film still sticks with me all these months later as I write up this review for my blog here, So any film that stays with you that long and tells such an emotional story so well must be seen by others, so I hope this film gets released to the general public more – whether through cinema or a DVD release.

– Photograph in Feature Image © Funan by Denis Do