Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center is pleased to announce it has been awarded a three-year grant of 500,000 USD from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the center’s program “Training tomorrow’s film directors and promoting academic and cultural exchange through Cambodia’s filmmaking” from 2022 to 2025.

The program aims at building the capacity of Cambodian youths to be future filmmakers and supporting them to produce films across the topics of their interest; and supporting the development of expertise in-and-about Southeast Asia through the fostered engagement between Cambodian and American institutions.

The program provides full one-year fellowships to 36 Khmer and indigenous youths from different communities in Cambodia on documentary filmmaking from theory to practice. The trainees will learn the whole process of documentary film production (pre-production, production and post-production) so that they are able to produce short films that examine the complex range of political, economic and social issues that affect marginalized communities in Cambodia.

In partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, (UC-B) and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the program will organize the annual reciprocal two-week exchange that will, in turn, bring Bophana archivists to BAMPFA to expand their expertise in the areas of film preservation and archival management to further expand the public’s access to Cambodia’s cultural audiovisual memories.

 About the Henry Luce Foundation
The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to enrich public discourse by promoting innovative scholarship, cultivating new leaders and fostering international understanding. The Foundation advances its mission through grantmaking and leadership programs in the fields of Asia, higher education, religion and theology, art and public policy. Established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., the Foundation’s programs today reflect the value Mr. Luce placed on learning and leadership.

About Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center
Founded as the Association pour la recherche, la production et l’archivage de documents audiovisuels in 2005 (ARPAA), Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center is a leading non-profit and non-governmental audiovisual archive center, committed to reviving the memory of Cambodia and fostering Cambodian culture through arts and multimedia. This memory and culture have been nearly destroyed by three decades of war and genocide. Aiming to reconstruct the memory of Cambodia, under the term “Save and Resuscitate Yesterday’s and Today’s Memories”, Bophana Center collects and safeguards audiovisual archives of Cambodia including films, photos and sound archives from around the world; provides public access to this audiovisual heritage; and trains youths in filmmaking to facilitate freedom and artistic expression and for archiving the country. These efforts will help Cambodians to gradually restore this priceless heritage, and will enable them to understand their past, build their present and invent their future.

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