The lands of the wandering souls

In 1999, the works for the laying of the first optical fibre cable in South-East Asia is crossing Cambodia from the Thai border to the frontier with Vietnam. The cable is to link up with another running from Europe along the Silk Road. The worksite provides employment opportunities for many Cambodians. Peasants with no land, demobilized soldiers, and families with no resources have thus been nomadised as the works advance. The Cambodian director Rithy Pahn has followed some of these people, who embody and exemplify the contradictions which must be overcome to bring their country back to life. As well as the confrontation between the arrival of an 'information superhighway' whose purpose is integration into the world economy and a traditional culture devastated by thirty years of war, the film explores the issues of employment and of the future, in a country where the future often takes the basic form of findign food for the present.