We followed Chanrithy Him on a lecture tour, and observed how she was regularly confronted with her own pain, and challenged on her ability to forgive and practice reconciliation. An entire continent's views are on display when she is questioned about her statements about reconciliation by young students, Vietnam veterans, teachers and others. The majority of young Americans want justice, protection and vengeance, and it comes as a shock to many that when confronted with their country's bombing campaign in Cambodia, and the assistance given to refugees such as Chanrithy, the U.S.A. is perceived as both persecutor and angel. Yet they have no real knowledge of real suffering. The suffering that lays in a little girl's loss of childhood, the farewell she was never given with her executed parents, the final help that she was never able to provide her mother, and the loss of the beloved sister, whom she could not save. Chanrithy is still fighting to forgive herself and accept the state of helplessness, which the Khmer Rouge brutally forced on to an entire people.

Yet my questions about Love, Hate and Reconciliation also reveal the depth of contrast between people. Everywhere we filmed, we where met by an unexpected and overwhelming mixture of forgiveness, reconciliation, spirituality, hate and vengeance. My film is first and foremost a documentary review of the experiences I have had in the process of the last six months. A process, which began in September 2001 with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and was rounded off precisely six months later by my meeting with Chanrithy Him on the 11th of March in New York. In addition, the film is a personal and poetically inspired recollection of the people and the varying views on human nature that I have met on my travels - from Europe, through South Africa and South America, to North America. People from three strange continents, whose different views about love, hate and reconciliation I have attempted to reflect in the filmic context, which The Will to Live in its own strange way determined for itself.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5