Barbara Wurm: Welcome Rithy Panh, let us start the conversation about your new film NOUS SOMMES LES FRUITS DE LA FORÊT (WE ARE THE FRUITS OF THE FOREST) by mentioning your two previous ones. They were shown in competition at the Berlinale: IRRADIÉS (IRRADIATED, 2020), which won the Documentary Award, and then EVERYTHING WILL BE OK (2022). These are two extremely radical montage-thesis films.
Rithy Panh: NOUS SOMMES LES FRUITS DE LA FORÊT started with a feeling. Something called me to go there, because the ecological problem with the forest in Cambodia disappearing has already been going on for years and people who belong to ethnic minorities disappear every month, every week. At a certain point, they will be gone. The essence of living there in the forest is the understanding of cosmogony. The essence of being human comes from there. So I went to the forest, to the Bunong, and little by little we started to trust each other. This seems to be very simple, but it was a very difficult film for me to make because I do not speak Bunong. I’m happy that I let them speak in their language, not in Cambodian, and that I have recorded this. I thank you a lot for making the choice to select this film, because it may be the first and the last time to hear Bunong. When I’m making a film, I’m also discovering a dark side of myself, as if I found within myself a lack of empathy. And I asked myself, why do they have to speak to me in Cambodian and why don’t I make the effort to understand them in their language? A lot of small things like that came together. It took time. I know we will all stay friends. Sometimes I receive a message that says ‘Do you want some passion fruit?’ And they send me three sacks of passion fruit, the good ones from the highland. Or they found honey… The real bees live in the forest and every three months, the taste of the honey changes because the flowers bloom differently all the time. But we lost all this, because people start to say, ‘We are bio now.’ So they go and buy the honey from these people and money comes to them, which is something very dangerous. We all exchange things with money, but money in the capitalist system really destroys things. Because before, honey was not sold within this community, it was shared.
BW: But your film gives everything back, the taste of the honey, the understanding of the different flowers. And then you take away the idea of production because everything we see is handmade and self-sustained. We learn so much about it through your film.
RP: Pa Kreb is maybe the last one in his village who still knows how to do everything. If you want to cook a soup in a bamboo cane, he can do it. When we went to his field up in the mountain, we didn’t bring much food, only salt or something like that. We ate what we found. Sometimes he would catch an animal, other times not. The highland is like a fridge for the Bunong. You take from nature only what you need, nothing to sell. I miss all of this, because now in Cambodia since COVID, a lot of companies appeared to deliver food. Before you went to to eat in a shop. Now, you don’t need to leave the house anymore.
We don’t take ten kilos when we only need 500 grams. We come back tomorrow. We respect the rhythm of life. We eat food only for living.
That is easy, but you loose a lot. You loose the smell, the way to appreciate food. Food has become just consumerism, not a way of living. When you connect to the Bunong, they teach you that food is natural. It’s smell, it’s heart, it’s wind, everything. It also needs respect. We don’t take ten kilos when we only need 500 grams. We come back tomorrow. We respect the rhythm of life. We eat food only for living. We do not eat food to appreciate our existence during our passage through the world. The making of the film also took several years because the Bunong never repeat anything, the spirit doesn’t allow it. If you want to film a ceremony and you miss part of it, then you missed it. I cannot ask them to do it again. It’s forbidden. And I needed this notion of missing things. I never miss anything with a digital device, because I can film all the time. And I can rework it later. But cinema is also about missing something and then you come back and try to find it again. Now I will start a new project with a Super 8 camera, because then I will have only three minutes and I will certainly miss things.
BW: You have this theme of the missed thing a lot, not only in this film. Is that also a reason why you go back to the archive so often?
RP: I fall into archives like one falls in love. Sometimes I use the same archival footage in different films – exactly the same. It seems as if I repeat myself, but people don’t hear me, so I show it again. Also, it might be the same footage, but it will not have the same significance. It’s like an echo. I’m talking a lot now about the echo, about reminiscence, which is like an echo from a star that died many hundred years ago, but you still see the light. A fossil image. In an archive, things fade and I cannot interpret this impression. I can’t feel their sound. I see only a background. I see a face. I see eyes. I can spend hours, nights just watching archival footage. You are right. It’s like I try to find a trace of something I have missed. I’ve seen the Khmer Rouge destroy all images of Cambodia. But even after the Khmer Rouge, we had no cinematheque. That’s why I founded the Bophana Center twenty years ago. In the beginning nobody understood why I did this. It’s an archive with free access for everybody, because there is a political and social lesson one can learn there. Archives don’t lie, even when they collect propaganda films. You can watch it, but in order to understand, you need to read it with a reading book, which you receive at the Bophana Center.
Christiane Büchner: I was fascinated by how you separate what we see from the voice we hear and the economic lesson we get. And the database of the person who lectures us is the distance to his father. I saw the archival footage as a measurement in time, too. How far can we go back?
RP: Yeah, you are right, because they don’t think in timespans like us – 1930 or 1920. He is his grandpa. It’s a timespan. They live only for 50 years, 60 years, because these people work too hard. Heavy physical work and no modern medicine. So 80 years is a very long lifespan. I think they measure in about 60 years. And you can imagine that in 30 years, less than a lifetime, the forest will have disappeared. In the scale of history, this is very fast. It’s less than one generation. When I started making films 40 years ago, I gave myself a rule: Filming means listening to people, not filming about people. Filming means making a film in order to be with the people you film. If the Bunong go to the forest, I go to the forest. If they go into the water, I go into the water. If they walk in the the rain, I walk in the rain and listen to them. And why? When you listen to the people you are filming, you learn how smart they are. It is their culture, their time… The time of his grandfather, the time of his father, his time – when the time of his son comes, there will be no more trees. It’s very political. It’s also poetic, this way of measuring time. And because we listen to them, we learn about it. Most of the time we have questions that we already know the answers to. Or we talk about people because we don’t understand them. Even when I worked with interpreters, the Bunong stayed inside their own structure. I like this very much. They repeat themselves sometimes, but it’s always different. At a certain moment in the editing, I spoke with Catherine Dussart, my producer, about whether the audience will be bored because of Pa Kreb’s repetitions. It’s not an objective pyramid of thoughts, they come in circles, little by little, and they progress, like an atomic structure with an the electron. I decided to keep his variations. When we write a book or we make a film, we do not know the best language to approach the audience. We just say, ‘I see something bad happening to us, and I beg you to stay for an hour and a half with me and listen to what these people have to say.’
I’m not asking people while they are walking or doing something. I am just with them.
BW: Can you describe how you talked with Pa Kreb? How was the interview conceived? Did you have translation?
RP: I didn’t want to him to talk to me in Khmer, in Cambodian, I asked him to speak Bunong. After all, I never ask a lot of questions. I don’t ask people while they are walking or doing something. I am just with them. Only afterwards did I explain to Pa Kreb that I need a text and I invited him to speak about images. He spoke about what he was doing. He saw this place, remembered what he was thinking when he cut the tree and told the story of the tree. I showed him footage of a ceremony and asked him about this so-called Money Ceremony: What is the meaning of it? The ceremony is one of seven. Rice, for example, has a spirit. For us, rice has no spirit. Rice is Uncle Ben’s. It’s just in the box. No more spirit. But rice has a spirit, and when you grow rice, in the beginning, the earth is sleeping, resting, you need a ceremony to wake up the earth. But when the global economy asks you to stop growing this special rice in the mountain and instead plant cashew trees, for example, you have not served the correct ceremony. I understand that we need progress. It’s a global world that wants to eat cereal in the morning, we need cashew nuts. You need tires for cars? Then we need rubber trees. But meanwhile the Bunong lose seven ceremonies. They lost their songs, they lost the prayers, they lost the flowers that they plant next to the bamboo, the sacred flower. We love all this because it looks so pure and simple. When I talk to people in Cambodia, they ask me, ‘Do you want them to stay naked?’ No, I want progress for them, too. They don’t have to stay as they were 100 years ago. But what kind of progress? What means progress for us if they lose all their ceremonies? That is the simple question.
BW: So you filmed and documented and then you showed the recordings to Pa Kreb?
RP: Yes, he spoke in Bunong and afterwards he translated himself. And when I made a mistake – sometimes you split a word when you translate from Bunong to Khmer, for example – he would say, ‘I didn’t say that. I said this.’ It was very funny to make subtitles together with him, because I needed to understand what he said first in Khmer, then I translated it into English and French, and then checked it again with him.
BW: Did you speak with the other protagonists? The younger ones?
RP: Yes, we talked a lot with the others too. But I like to focus on one or two characters. And Pa Kreb is so special because he is the last one who knows how to do everything. He’s a craftsman, a farmer, a philosopher, a healer, a hunter. He knows and can do a lot of things. I wanted to give him time to talk about every detail. It’s very difficult because he belongs to the young generation, he knows that his Bunong is already weak compared to the language of the generation before. And it is a very special language, for example when the singer sings a song, it is like a code. You cannot understand it. So if you want to translate and understand the meaning of the song, you have to go back, find a singer in a field and ask, ‘What did you sing about?’
BW: You use oral history strategies as a visual history because you share the same image, but only certain people have the knowledge to know what the image shows.
RP: Some gestures come back from the archive, they see them and repeat them. Sometimes they themselves do not understand their meaning because some linking piece disappeared. They just say it’s forbidden to repeat it, or we have to do this or that instead. But they still understand that when they collect rice, they have to throw rice on the road back home, to bring the soil to the house of the grain. It’s beautiful to bring the soil of the rice back to the village and afterwards back to the field. They are very poetic. They don’t just grow rice, cut, and eat it.
When I came back to Europe after making this film, I was sorry that I had to tell people here that green politicians sometimes do not understand anything about nature.
CB: You just said you also want progress for the Bunong. We see Pa Kreb hunting with a boom box. Did you talk about this with him?
RP: When you want to protect the Bunong, for example, you shouldn’t give them rules such as you cannot hunt here anymore. They’ve hunted for hundreds of years, learned it from their ancestors. They catch an animal to eat. Maybe one every three weeks. You will not extinguish a species that way. What destroys the animals is the industry, which wants a monkey for a laboratory. And then they take 60 or 100 monkeys, bring them somewhere and the monkeys disappear from this forest little by little. Or when you cut a tree, you also cut it’s soul. The soul is not only the soul of the tree, you destroy also the habitat of the birds. It’s not the Bunong who destroy the forest. When I came back to Europe after making this film, I was sorry that I had to tell people here that green politicians sometimes do not understand anything about nature. They just stay in Strasbourg, stay in Paris, read, sometimes go to conferences. When you come with ecologic rules to protect nature you have to respect these people’s rhythm of life. I don’t like the idea of protecting nature, I prefer to respect nature and people like the Bunong. To respect the circle of life. I lost faith in ecology politics, too much blah, blah in my opinion. It doesn’t correspond to what I feel when I’m in the forest. I prefer anthropology or something like that.
I want them to benefit from modern medicine, from science. But how we can balance it, how can we establish a fair exchange?
BW: There’s this one scene when they explain why they have to stop planting bamboo and instead plant cashew, rubber, coffee. It’s so ironic because it leads to a diversity that is completely dictated by the market’s needs.
RP: They don’t know what the market is.
BW: At the same time, they need to survive.
RP: Pa Kreb explains in the film why they need money. In fact, the middlemen come, buy cheap from them and sell it very expensive. When you tell the Bunong that you need 100 tons of cashew nuts, they might rip out the rice and plant cashew instead. And a century-long history of tradition dies with it. Their rice is very special. But nowadays you have a variety of different sorts of rice: genetically modified GMO rice, you also have chemicals, etc. That’s why I think that the Bunong will disappear, whatever they do. This is tragic, but there’s no solution. I want them to benefit from modern medicine, from science. But how we can balance it, how can we establish a fair exchange?
BW: I wanted to ask you about shooting the film. How did you direct it, and where are you in these scenes?
RP: I don’t tell them too much what to do. Sometimes I was not there, but my assistant had a small camera. When something urgent came up, he could go with them when I wasn’t there. So he went up to the mountains for one week and when he came back he found a spot with internet access and wrote me, ‘Oh, uncle, they will start cutting or burning the field.’ OK, then I would come. But the Bunong do not have the same notion of time as we have. He said, in three days, they will do this or that. I travel there, and three days pass and nothing happens. OK, we wait. Once we were there, we didn’t want to leave, we changed our idea, and I stayed near the mountain for about a week. But the economy of cinema doesn’t allow you this anymore. We are much more into the logic of financial administration than in the logic of human rhythm or cinematography. Most of the time producers say, eight weeks? Eight weeks! I am very lucky to have a producer who likes the way I work, she is a partner. I tell her, ‘Look, I don’t need more money than you can spend. But give me the possibility to manage the time. That’s all. If you budget the film for eight months, I make it in four years with the same budget.’ I cannot work fast. I need time. But I cannot ask people to pay four times more. They will not be able do this. With documentary film we are in an economic system. We need to manage our time, the budget, manage editing...
CB: Tell us about the process the editing process.
RP: Editing is in fact my passion. I can spend day and night… I sleep in my editing room most of the time. I have a bathroom, a kitchen, and I lock myself in and work all the time. I need this way of working. I really need to feel deep inside me to understand what an image can be. When I started to make films, I also did the sound. Sometimes I forget the sound. When you watch the material later, it doesn’t recall the same feeling that I had when I was filming. Since I have no money, my driver is also recording the sound. In my team, everyone does everything. My assistant can cook, my driver can record sound, and if he mixes up the buttons of the device I will have no sound. In such a case they go back and capture sounds and send it to me. But this is nothing compared to the real original sound. These are only like different motifs, and I need to build the sound. When I start, within 10 minutes, I already have 74 tracks of sound. Just different ambiances that I compare to my memory of the sound that I heard when I was there. When I start making a film, I’m a fanatic, cinema verité radical. But little by little, at the end, you frame, you edit. Why not try to let the audience hear the real sound? Hear the wind, the water, really. But when you follow someone with a recorder who walks through water, you don’t put the microphone on his feet. You follow him and you miss a lot. Or the water is so loud that you cannot hear the bird’s voice. Sometimes between shoots, I just closed my eyes and tried to record things in my mind. Sometimes you cannot work during daytime. Then you work at night. Because at night, you are alone, no noise from the city, nobody calls you. It’s a good time to work. Sometimes I just watch a sequence and watch it again for many times and eventually I find access to it. If I feel good, it’s good, if not, we start to edit again.
BW: Does the split screen also come from this playful or liberating idea?
RP: Yeah. But also because in the beginning I thought, if I don’t split the screen, my film will be two, three hours long. If I split, maybe I manage to end up with an hour and a half. It was a very naive idea. But after you develop it and you see how one image can echo the other image, it becomes easy. Also the flashes. I use them all the time. It’s just me. When I work, I sometimes see a flash and I respect what I see... Sometimes when you talk to the people who want to make a film, they tell a nice story about what their film is about. And when you see the film later, you cannot see this nice story in the film. Same with me. I tell myself my own story, but I can’t see it in the film. And then sometimes I see a flash. Why not put it in the film? Or repeating footage, why not? Do it. That comes from many film directors before me. Like Jonas Mekas, like Chris Marker. That’s freedom, yes. Chris Marker is telling me a lot about Chris Marker. At the point, when I have no more ideas, I say, ‘Oh, Chris Marker, help me! There’s something wrong. I’m lost. They don’t like the film. They don’t understand it.’ And Chris Marker comes, he takes out a cigarette and says, ‘Don’t worry, go back and do it again.’ And I discovered that Chris Marker started his film biography as an editor for Alain Resnais. Editing is very interesting.
BW: This is a perfect surreal ending of our not at all surreal, but very superb talk. We’re very much looking forward to continuing when you are in Berlin. Rithy, thank you so much.
RP: Thank you.
