For some French colonists, Indochina was an idyll of sun-dappled verandas, silent servants and long glasses of Pernod in the afternoon. For others, like the family of novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, it was an exhausting ordeal. Their story, as told in Duras' semi-autobiographical novel Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique (1950), is the subject of Cambodian director Rithy Panh's most recent work, The Sea Wall .
Set in 1931, the film relates how Duras' impoverished and widowed mother struggled to establish a rice plantation straddling the Gulf of Siam...
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