Reflection on Lost World by Kalyanee Mam

This past week, I had the pleasure of hearing Kalyanee Mam, the creator of the award-winning film A River Changes Course, speak and screen her newest film, Lost World. To begin the event, Mam asked the audience, “What is home to you?” Members of the audience responded with common ideas about parents, friends, safety. One said it was where their family is, the next where laughter is heard, and a third where worries are absent. The unifying theme was one of security in place, where home is a constant, guaranteed. The relevance of this conversation would become clear with our watching of her film Lost World. Where we members of the audience found comfort in things beyond the strictly physical nature of our planet, the subjects of her film grieved losing the very land beneath their feet, the soil that supported the ecosystems of those that came before them. We came to understand that, to conceptualize home as something that supersedes terrestrial elements, we must first have precisely those elements. Assaulting me, in that moment, was the realization of the privilege that is associated with such abstract notions of home. Only when one has ground to live and stand on, it seemed, can one claim something hypothetical or intangible as their habitation.

Lost World documents the excavation of sand under the expansive mangrove forests of Cambodia, a process known as sand-dredging that threatens both the health of natural habitats in the region and the long-term viability of the area. The vast majority of sand from Cambodia is sent to Singapore, where it is used to expand the islands and land mass of the country. The Cambodian government actually facilitates this process, subsidizing the process of sand removal, which is generally done by Cambodian companies as well. The situation stands as a harsh example of the suffocating pressures of globalization on developing countries and regions. After the screening, we discussed the elements of the film to which we connected most. In this conversation, the direct analogy between this plunder of Cambodia and the historic theft of land from Native Americans was mentioned. I also saw a link between Lost World and the more recent land seizure, gentrification, and cultural obliteration in past and present Los Angeles. In isolation, the sand-dredging in Cambodia is clearly tragic, but might not seem directly relevant to us students in Southern California. However, in our increasingly global world, the connections are limitless.

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