Migrant Films, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation presents; director, Kalyanee Mam. [Chicago, IL]: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Paris: CAT&
Docs [Distributor], 2013. 1 DVD (84 min.) US$300.00, Colleges and Universities; US150.00, K-12/Public Libraries; US$20.00, Home Use. In Khmu with subtitles in English and Khmu. http://www.ariverchangescourse.com/ http://www.catndocs.com/.
In A River Changes Course, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam follows the lives of three families in rural Cambodia and documents their transformation due to recent development in the country. In a remote jungle in northern Cambodia, a young mother Sav Samoun lives a traditional and simple life on the mountains, where her children can easily dig up potatoes for food. She laments the changes that are taking place around her home as a result of the encroachment of development and deforestation. Like her neighbours, she must also sell her land to logging companies. In a fishing hamlet on the Tonle Sap River of central Cambodia, a teenage boy Sari Math lives an idyllic life of fishing and devotion to Islamic tradition and secular study. As the fish catch dwindles, his father sends Sari to work at a Chinese-run cassava plantation in order to earn extra income for the family. From a village outside of Phnom Penh, a young woman Khieu Mok leaves home and seeks work in a city’s garment factory in order to help her family pay off debt. She quickly discovers that city life is not easy and innocently wishes that the factory moved to her village.
In addition to intimately documenting the changes that occurred in these three lives and their environment, Mam masterfully shows the cultural transformation that accompanied them. In the forest of northern Cambodia, for example, villagers no longer are afraid of wild animals and ghosts; instead, they now fear the people who are coming to their mountains and destroying their forests. Similarly, Sari has dreamt of being a fisherman for the rest of his life. Recent dam constructions on the upstream Mekong River, which disrupts the traditional water flow in and out of the Tonle Sap, are shattering that dream as he must leave his beloved fishing hamlet and become a migrant worker. Khieu, too, struggles to balance her filial duty to her family: being apart from her family and working in the factory versus looking after her aging parents at home and helping them with the harvest.
Mam carefully and successfully connects her audience with these three Cambodian families without preaching to the audience (or to her subjects) about the consequence of Cambodia’s recent development and cultural shift. This is best depicted in a scene of a pre-puberty country bumpkin in the fishing hamlet who sings: “If you marry a city man, you will be short of money. But if you choose me, you will have dollars to spend. Darling, you will have a Lexus and a villa. Wherever you go, you will be modern and stylish.” The audience can understand/lament the demands of money-culture in the city and can appreciate the innocence and the naiveté of the young boy because we can anticipate what will happen to him and his dream. This intimate connection with the audience is helped by the camera angle: often top-down when filming two young siblings at play on the mountain and bottom-up when filming Sari on the boat in the Tonle Sap.
Mam’s ability to tell such stories from an insider’s intimate perspective with an outsider’s neutral objectivity reflects her own personal and educational background and filmography. Mam was born in Battambang of western Cambodia. In 1979, she escaped from Cambodia to the United States through a refugee camp in Thailand. After graduating from Yale and earning a law degree from UCLA, she turned to filmmaking. She is a cinematographer for the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job.A River Changes Course is her directorial debut and has won numerous prestigious awards, including the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. She has also won the 2013 Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award, which honours a documentary artist whose work serves as a catalyst for education and change.
In my opinion, this documentary film should be used in all college classrooms that discuss Southeast Asia and/or internal migrant workers. Mam is planning to make a sequel of this documentary, as Sari has now become a transnational migrant worker in South Korea. It is rare that a filmmaker/scholar can follow the life of an individual from his early school years to the time he becomes a migrant worker and eventually a transnational migrant. Kalyanee Mam has something special with Sari and many who have seen this film will want to know what has become of him in Seoul.
Apichai W. Shipper
Georgetown University, Arlington, USA
pp. 921-923