ស្គាល់ មជាតិ Knowing Your Taste – Kalyanee Mam

Released this week, the final film in our Shifting Landscapes
documentary film series, Taste of the Land, tells the story of
Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s search for a spiritual
relationship with her homeland. In this companion essay by
Kalyanee, she delves deeper into her experiences of cheate—the
Khmer word for “taste”—and how she came to understand that to truly
know the essence of the land, one must know its taste. Tracing her
life back to its very beginnings, she shares her first
“land-taste”—the sweet flavor of Battambang oranges—and the many
tastes that came after that slowly deepened the yearning in her
heart to truly know the soils, waters, mountains, people, and
plants of Cambodia. As she reflects on the spiritual fallout of her
family’s severed relationship with their homeland, she also
contemplates the essential connection that was kept alive through
stories, language, and food shared by her parents.  Read the
essay  Watch the feature film Taste of the Land, by Adam
Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the fourth in our four-part
Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Jeremy
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