Cries of Our Ancestors

DR. REBECCA KORMOS (Co-Director/Producer)
Rebecca Kormos (formerly Rebecca Ham) has been involved in the conservation of chimpanzees in Guinea for over two decades. Between 1995 and 1997 Rebecca conducted the first nationwide survey of chimpanzees in Guinea. Funded by the European Union, her work revealed that Guinea had the largest population on P.t.verus in West Africa and that the largest number of chimpanzees were living in the Fouta Djallon. Following the work in Guinea, Rebecca then moved to Washington DC to work at the headquarters of WWF and Conservation International (CI) for five years. She designed and led a project to study the effects of armed conflict on biodiversity and ran the West Africa program for CI for several years. She then returned to Guinea to design an action plan for chimpanzees. In 2002, she worked in the Fouta with USAID to assess the success of a co-management of protected areas project. At the end of 2002, Rebecca worked with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to launch a section of the Primate Specialist Group that focused on the conservation of Great Apes. Then in 2008 she worked as a consultant for BHP Billiton on a Critical Habitat in the Fouta. Her focus then turned to policy and advocacy work, and she designed and implemented several projects that examined the International Performance Standards of the IFC and how they impact great apes. She also worked with her husband Cyril Kormos, to bring together conservationists and mining companies working in Guinea with the goal of creating aggregated offset sites, and she published a paper on the need for a national strategy for offsets in Guinea. She was commissioned by the World Bank to create a World Bank Strategy for Apes which she wrote in collaboration with a coalition of colleagues. She leads a new IUCN task force on Apes and Energy, Extractives, and Associated Infrastructure and was recently elected to an Executive committee of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group Section on Great Apes. She is also part of the core technical group organizing the updating of the action plan for chimpanzees in West Africa, and an SGA representatives for the Guinea national plan. Rebecca now works as a Senior Associate at Global Wildlife Conservation. To the Demou Project, she brings long-term knowledge of chimpanzees and the ecology of Guinea, and the impacts that mining has had historically and today.

KALYANEE MAM (Co-Director, Producer, Cinematographer)
Kalyanee has always been intrigued and inspired by the story of home. Born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, which took the lives of nearly two million people, she and her family were forced to flee their homeland, eventually arriving in the United States in 1981. Even to this day her mother recounts stories of their flight through jungles laden with land mines. Her effort to understand home has led her to work on films about war and refugees, about families threatened and displaced by the destruction of their land, about forests and rivers, cultures and traditions, myths and stories. Her film A River Changes Course has won several awards, including the Sundance Grand Jury Award for World Cinema Documentary and the Golden Gate Award for Best Feature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. A New York Times Critics Pick, NYT considered the film, “profound enough to stand on its own,” while the Los Angeles Times described the film as, "A deeply felt portrait of Cambodia...exquisite in its immediacy and agility." For the last four years Kalyanee has been living with Reem Sav See and her family in Areng Valley, located in Southwest Cambodia, and following intimately their way of life, spiritual ceremonies, traditional plants and medicine, and folktales and stories, so deeply connected with nature and that inspire the people of this valley to love and protect their home. The short, Fight for Areng Valley, was featured on the New York Times Op-Docs Series under the title "A Threat to Cambodia's Sacred Forest." Her latest work, Lost World, featured in Emergence Magazine and received The Eric Moe Award for Best Short on Sustainability. She also worked as a cinematographer and associate producer on 2011 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job. Her work has been generously supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Kendeda Fund, Kalliopeia Foundation, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Women Make Movies, Chicken & Egg Pictures, the Tide Foundation, Skywalker Ranch, the Jeffrey Walker Family Foundation, and Ken Pelletier.