In Cambodia, A Tide Of 'Change' Sweeps Some Lives Under
In Kalyanee Mam's new documentary A River Changes Course, a teacher stands before a room packed with grade schoolers, leading them in an arithmetic drill. They're in Cambodia, and though the drill is in the Khmer language, the body language is clear enough as the children hold up their hands one at a time, displaying all five fingers: five and five make 10, in most any dialect.
That's one of the film's few optimistic scenes, however — and it's one not typical of the experiences of the three young Cambodians the filmmaker follows. Like many of their compatriots, they live off the land, or the water. For them, a classroom education remains a distant dream.
Among the three is Sari Math, a young man whom we first meet fishing with his father. Forced to leave that job, he goes to work on a cassava plantation owned by the Chinese. Another is Khieu Mok; faced with mounting debt, she prepares to leave her village and her family behind for the big city of Pnom Penh, where she'll go to work at a garment factory.
And Sav Samourn, a farmer in the mountainous jungles of northeast Cambodia, fears the creep of loggers deeper into her forest.
"We used to be afraid of animals here in the jungle," Sav says in the film. "Now there are no more animals. We are afraid of people who are going to destroy the forest."
Kalyanee Mam's film was honored earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Mam joined NPR's Robert Siegel on today's All Things Considered to talk about her film, about the tides of rivers and of history, and about the crush of modernization that's driving many Cambodians from their traditional livelihoods.