Page blanche traces the fate of a Cambodian woman Vixna (played by Phuong Dung) and her two children who in 1975 were lured back from the safety of Paris by the woman’s husband, a officer in Pol Pot’s army, to Cambodia where they underwent the complete Khmer Rouge brainwashing and enslavement. The bleak reality soon gets through to her, but not all its implications. That is also the course of the film: it shows the horrors with apparent stoicism, but the cruelty was real and incredible and the film tries to capture it.The woman is separated from her children and put to work in an commune where she has to do heavy labour for the ‘agricultural miracle’ of the Khmer Rouge. Many of her fellow victims die. She has to bone corpses to provide raw material for glue. Everything seems justified for the revolution of the Angkar (the Cambodian communist party).Page blanche is shot in authentic locations in Cambodia and follows the experiences of the woman until the ‘liberation’ by Vietnam in 1979. David Stratton (Variety): ‘Ho Quang Minh tells this ultra-grim tale very much from a Vietnamese perspective and tends to down-play the terrible saga’s emotional aspects.’ The film could be described as South-East Asia’s answer to The Killing Fields. Contrary to the visual baroque of the western portrayal of the terror of the Khmer Rouge, Ho Quang Minh poses peaceful, detached and sometimes shockingly beautiful pictures. The cruelty of the Khmer soldiers leaves the landscape and the fascinating light unaffected and the indifference of nature and the precise frames in the film make Page blanche a convincing and emotional interpretation.
