Regional Premiere of Documentary Film at Duke Dec. 2

DURHAM, N.C. -- The Southern premiere of "The Will to Live," a documentary that examines the lives of three people who have suffered brutal oppression and tragic loss but have worked toward reconciliation with their oppressors, will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 2, at Duke University's Richard White Lecture Hall.

Anne-Gyrithe Bonne, the Danish director and filmmaker of "The Will to Live: A Notebook on Love, Hate and Reconciliation," will be present at the Duke showing, as will one of the film's subjects, Cambodian-American writer Chanrithy Him. A discussion will follow the screening. The event is free and open to the public.

Among the extraordinary lives illuminated by Bonne is that of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Honduran physician and human-rights activist Juan Almendares, and Him, author of "When Broken Glass Floats," an award-winning memoir about growing up under the Khmer Rouge.

Of the 12-member Him family, only five children survived the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s. Chanrithy Him says she wrote her book because she was compelled to testify on behalf of the millions who lived and died there -- to tell a story, she says, "worthy of the suffering ... I endured as a child."

Him also is a classical Cambodian dancer who received a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon and later worked as a research assistant on a long-term study on post-traumatic stress disorder among Cambodian refugees in the U.S. She is at work on "Unbroken Spirit," a sequel to her first book.

This event is sponsored by the Humanitarian Challenges at Home and Abroad FOCUS Program at Duke and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs. Co-sponsors include Duke's Film/Video/Digital Program, the Duke Institute of the Arts, the Center for International Studies with support from the US Department of Education, the Asian Pacific Studies Institute, the Department of History and the Center for Documentary Studies.