2013 CDS Filmmaker Award: Kalyanee Mam "A River Changes Course"

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival announced the 2013 festival award recipients on April 7, 2013, the last day of the sixteenth annual event. Ten awards and two Honorable Mentions were given. This year's CDS Filmmaker Award went to director Kalyanee Mam for her documentary film A River Changes Course.

Mam spent two years in her native country working on the film, which travels from the remote countryside to the garment factories of Phnom Penh in portraying three rural Cambodian families and their vanishing way of life in the face of globalization and encroaching development. A partial description from the Full Frame program: “Musing on what comes next, and how to get there, it seems that there are only questions. Is an eldest child’s service to the family sacrifice, or an opportunity for autonomy? How important is education and how is its value quantified? … When a family leaves its traditional path, will it still know how to be a family?” A River Changes Course won a World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.