Cambodia: Turning Minefields into Mindfields

Written By Sil Azevedo

This short documentary we produced was selected to be preserved in the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

In their request, the center wrote:

"We learned about the film and were very interested in its story of Bill and Jill Morse, who moved to Cambodia to contribute to landmine removal and whose work has had a lasting impact on communities in Cambodia. We believe the film is particularly valuable because it documents an important part of Cambodia's contemporary history, including the legacy of landmines, humanitarian work, and the people who have contributed to rebuilding and supporting Cambodian communities."

Collective memory preservation is crucial for a people to understand their purpose and realize their potential. Cambodia is a lovely country that came out of the ashes of a terrible genocide that took the lives of a quarter of its population to become a country of reconciliation and hope for the future.

If you would like to learn more about Bill and Jill's inspiring journey, you can watch the film here:


Sil Azevedo

I was seven years old when I got my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 133. It was Christmas of 1973. Since then, I have always seen the world through the lens. It is my way of making sense, of visually dealing with paradoxes and complexities of life. In high school I was the lab rat and spent each free minute at the feet of the Beseler enlarger, hypnotized by its magical light. Still today I enjoy low light ambiences. They say photographers do it in the dark. I am living proof - ha! Architecture school followed as photography was not a career option in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The combination of art, composition, light, form and space, coupled with the demands of physics found in Architecture have their parallel in photography. The concepts are transferable. As I started my career in Architecture, I soon found that I was more excited about the concept and the print than the actual building. Fantasy is my reality. I kept shooting, learning and apprenticing with some incredible artists. In time, as life took its turns, my original passion for photography became my full time profession. It has been almost 20 years since I walked into the pro shop and charged the Hasselblad and the studio lights to my credit card. As he saw the bill and my naive optimism, even the salesman exclaimed, "you're going to have to sell a lot of pictures..." I did and still do, but what drives me is not that. It is the unstoppable desire to understand and to relate. To me, that is photography.

http://silazevedo.com
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A Tender Story of Healing and Hope