Creator
Kalyanee Mam
Cambodian American filmmaker and CTFF committee member whose documentary A River Changes Course screened at the first Cambodia Town Film Festival.
Kalyanee Mam is a Cambodian American documentary filmmaker and lawyer who directed A River Changes Course (2013).[1][2] Her films follow the human and environmental effects of rapid development in Cambodia.[3]
Early life and law career
Mam left Cambodia as a child refugee after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. She lived for two years in a refugee camp in Thailand and was resettled in Houston, Texas, in 1981.[4]
Mam studied at Yale University.[5] In 1998 she returned to Cambodia for the first time since leaving. Working with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, she traveled throughout the country to research her senior thesis, "The Endurance of the Cambodian Family Under the Khmer Rouge Regime."[2][3] After graduating, she lived in Cambodia for a year, working on a fellowship paper on crimes committed against women during the Khmer Rouge regime.[2][3]
Mam graduated from the UCLA School of Law and worked as a legal consultant in Mozambique and Iraq.[5][3] In Iraq she spent six months helping the government reform its commercial laws, and she recorded Iraqi people's stories of life under Saddam Hussein, the sanctions and the U.S. occupation.[4][3] She has no formal training as a filmmaker.[2]
Films
Mam co-directed and co-produced the short documentary Between Earth & Sky (2010), about Iraqi refugees. It tells three stories: an artist family in Jordan, two separated brothers in Syria and Egypt, and a 16-year-old refugee artist in Egypt. She lived with the artist family for about a month to gain their trust.[5][4]
Mam worked with director Charles Ferguson on the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job, about the global financial crisis, as director of photography, associate producer and researcher.[1][2] A visit to Cambodia in October 2008 moved her to make a film about the country.[3][2] Her debut feature, A River Changes Course, which she directed and produced, follows three families trying to keep their traditional way of life as Cambodia modernizes.[6][5] Mam has said that the film was made to tell the story of the Cambodian struggle today.[2] It has been screened in schools, universities and government offices in the United States, and in Cambodian villages, communities and embassies.[5]
By 2018 Mam had spent three years living with an Indigenous family in the Areng Valley in southwest Cambodia, recording their way of life, spiritual ceremonies, traditional plants and medicine, and folktales.[6] The Pulitzer Center gives the period as four years.[7] In 2014 she and her crew filmed the Chong people's opposition to the proposed Stung Cheay Areng dam in Koh Kong Province.[8] Her short Fight for Areng Valley was featured in the New York Times Op-Docs series as "A Threat to Cambodia's Sacred Forests." It shows how the dam, to be built by the Chinese company Sinohydro, would affect the Chong people and the biodiversity of the valley it would flood.[5][6][9]
Lost World (2018) is a 16-minute documentary in Khmer with English subtitles. It follows a Koh Sralau community whose livelihood is threatened as sand is dredged from beneath Cambodia's mangrove forests for Singapore.[6][9] Mam came to the story through Mother Nature Cambodia, and she lived in the community while filming families as they measured the depth of the dredging.[9][10] Her other shorts include Cries of Our Ancestors.[11] As of 2024, she was working on the feature documentary The Fire and the Bird's Nest.[9]
Her work has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Pulitzer Center, Women Make Movies, Chicken & Egg Pictures and the Documentation Center of Cambodia, among others.[7]
At the Cambodia Town Film Festival
A River Changes Course screened at the first Cambodia Town Film Festival in 2013, and Lost World screened there in 2018. In 2013 Mam was a member of the festival committee.[1][6]
Recognition
For A River Changes Course:
- World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, documentary, Sundance Film Festival (2013)[1][6]
- Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature, San Francisco International Film Festival (2013)[5][6]
For Lost World:
- Eric Moe Award for Best Short on Sustainability[7]
Mam was a Young Leader of the French-American Foundation in 2012.[5]
Works
- A River Changes Course (Film)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Cambodia Town Film Festival, Cambodia Town Film Festival Travels The Globe (archived)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Long Beach Post, Award-winning filmmaker documents globalization in Cambodia (September 10, 2013)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Kalyanee Mam, Wikipedia
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 UNHCR, Q&A: Former Cambodian refugee chronicles Iraqi displacement
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 French-American Foundation, Kalyanee Mam (August 4, 2014)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 Cambodia Town Film Festival, CTFF 2018 Official Selection: Short Film Corner (archived)
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Pulitzer Center, Kalyanee Mam
- ↑ VOA Khmer, "Remembering Cambodia's Heritage" by Kalyanee Mam (October 15, 2014)
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Emergence Magazine, Documenting Shifting Landscapes: A Conversation with Kalyanee Mam (September 18, 2024)
- ↑ Emergence Magazine, Documenting Shifting Landscapes (conversation page, September 18, 2024)
- ↑ Emergence Magazine, Unraveling the Stitches, Kalyanee Mam (April 25, 2022)