Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42578 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-10-23

Amazon.com
One of the most mythic and potent journeys of our time, up the Mekong River through the exquisite, complicated terrain of Vietnam and Cambodia to the great ruins at Angkor - the magnificent Khmer temples built from the 9th-13th centuries AD that are being painstakingly restored deep in the Cambodian jungle.

Director Les Guthman travels by boat up a river whose raw beauty and power were celebrated by Marguerite Duras in the 1920s.

But in our time it became known as "the river of evil memory" as it coursed through Southeast Asia in the second half of the 20th century.

Today, the river in Vietnam is filled with the vibrant life of a young nation free of a century of war. In Cambodia the past weighs far heavier. We travel up the Mekong passed Phnom Penh, once called "the beguiling beauty of SE Asia," toward the Laotian border in search of the almost-extinct fresh water dolphins of the Mekong; then return back to the capital and head northwest up one of the world's unique natural wonders, the Tonle Sap River, and across the great Tonle Sap Lake, one of the planet's most abundant fisheries.

In Angkor, World Monuments Fund experts describe their 15-year restoration of one of the jewels of a city called "the eighth wonder of the world," the 12th century palace complex of Preah Khan. And as they take us on an insider's tour of Preah Khan, along with the other major sites of Angkor Wat, Bayon and Banteay Srei, we learn that the story of their work in Angkor is not only a story of the rebirth of Angkor after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge Era, but it is also a story of the rebirth of Cambodia.

A stunningly filmed high definition odyssey up a river far distanced in time from the corridor into the heart of darkness portrayed in Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."

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Customer Reviews

exceptionally done
The cinematography in this video is exceptional. The history and richness of this area is very powerful. I highly recommend this video for anyone going to visit Cambodia and Vietnam or has interest in the history of this area. Excellent!!

Churning the Sea of Time: A Journey Up the Mekong of Angkor
This is a beautiful film. Unfortunately it is marred somewhat by the narrator's glaring misprounuciation of key place names like "Angkor" which he persists in calling "angor" despite the fact that some of the experts featured pronounce it correctly. He also calls the temple Banteay Srei something like "Banteay Serei, which has a completely different meaning in Khmer. In addition, he makes a glaring error in his pronounciation of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta town My Tho, as most foreigners do. It would have been quite simple to check and correct these errors prior to release of the film and one has to wonder why such an apparently professional producer did not bother to do this. I still recommend the film highly, in part because there are no real alternative choices for those interested in Cambodia and the Mekong Delta.

Churning the Sea of Time
The title of this seems to be a blend of John Swaine's River of Time and The Churning of the Ocean of Milk, a Hindu myth depicted in bas-relief in a gallery of Angkor Wat. This is a very interesting travelogue, with the Mekong as its focus, strating the journey in Vietnamese delta and progressing to Cambodia. There are interviews with ruin restorers in the Angkor Thom complex as well as shots of the rare Mekong dolphin around Kratie. There are constant references to Copplola's Apocalypse Now but this does not detract from the narrative. An excellent DVD.