BE'JAM BE the Never Ending Song
Cyprien Ponson, Caroline Parietti
2017 - 97 min - Vidéo Full HD - France, Suisse

In Sarawak, one of the two Malay states on the island of Borneo, "the ones who live upstream" are the first affected by the deforestation. The Penan, once a nomadic people, are caught today in the eye of that storm: how to go on living when one’s entered world is being taken apart, when the landscape, which brought meaning to existence, literally disappears and with it language, customs and the spirits?
As Peng and Tepeket, hunters-storytellers, confront the oncoming of yet another deforestation company, as Jalung, the guide, traces for us the path the film will take: "amé penan / we Penan", the community gathers to relate their struggle against extinction. The apocalypse is the end of a world - beginning of a new one.
The film, carried by the songs of those who have, against all odds, refused to give in, tells of the intimate interweaving of an older bittersweet way of life and the fight, which now rages in the shadows of the big trees. It ends up drawing the lines of resistance of each parties to that deadly fight.