In a remote mountainous region of Cambodia, a few Bunong families struggle to preserve ancestral traditions as their world steadily disappears. These first people have endured a slow tragedy shaped by the loss of land to international conglomerates and by climate change, which unsettles the seasons and breaks the rhythm of cultivation. Their fragile continuity becomes an urgent testimony to a way of life pushed to the edge of survival. 

We Are the Fruits of the Forest finds Rithy Panh mourning the destruction of tradition, an enduring concern of his cinema. Over four years in Cambodia’s northeastern mountains, he follows Indigenous communities preserving ancestral ways of life and a profound bond with nature. In a world where the past remains present through constant awareness and dialogue, Panh maps the erosion of the forest dwellers’ culture, linking it to the urgent contemporary crisis of ecological destruction. The devastation is already plain, yet the filmmaker also recognizes the need to preserve and contextualize archival footage amid this continuing threat.
The one sign of hope lies in the commitment of the narrator, Pa Kreb, a Bunong man, and his family. Yet his children are absorbed in the world of smartphones, with few means of connecting to the memory of earlier generations. For the parents, little seems to remain beyond recording their way of life. We Are the Fruits of the Forest is an elegy for the Bunong and their culture: it mourns the loss of the forest they revere as divine, and regards with sorrow a people pushed to the margins of their ancestral land, their lives governed by bank paperwork, their history and autonomy stripped away.

Rithy Panh returns to Cinéma du réel with a portrait of the Bunong, an Indigenous people of Cambodia whose culture faces extinction. In a remote mountain region, families maintain ancestral traditions while multi-national corporations seize their land. Climate change unsettles seasons, disrupting crop cycles and eroding the fertility of remaining plots. Lives shaped by dispossession and ecological crisis bear witness to a community under immense pressure, urging world recognition of this enduring tragedy before it is too late.

• ProducerCatherine DUSAART
• Screenplay Rithy PANH
• Cinematography Prum MESA, Mourng VET, Cheng SOCHEAT, Sok Chan RADO, Rithy PANH
• Edit Rithy PANH, Eang PISITH
• Sound Vann SEREYRATANAK, Kon Srey NITH, Mang SARITH, Mourng VET
• Music Marc MARDER
• Cast Pa KREB, Mak KREB, Yeay KREB

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