THE LAND OF WANDERING SOULS

This compassionate portrait of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia portrays workers digging a trench across that country for a multinational company’s fiber optic cable, earning pennies a day as they contribute to a high-tech communication system that will otherwise never touch their lives. Though exhausted and uneducated, they are hardly naïve. In one scene, the laborers are plainly unimpressed by a patronizing company man’s enthusiastic description of the “magic eyes and ears” of the fiber optic cable they themselves will never use. Then there is the haunting legacy of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. “They turned my generation into ignorant masses—just animals,” one young man observes. “The Khmer Rouge drove us mad.” Every scene illuminates the dignity of a people recovering from a war that left mines and human remains that are still scattered across the countryside. Despite poverty and betrayal, the resilience and gentle common sense of the Cambodian people is undiminished.