What inspired you to make We Forgive but We Don't Forget? Can you tell us a little bit more about it?
The idea took shape slowly: through lectures that challenged my understanding of peace, conversations in Cambodia that stayed with me, and the powerful films of Rithy Panh and Joshua Oppenheimer, which showed how storytelling can confront silence. Out of these moments grew a renewed desire to use film to tell stories that matter.
That desire brought me back to Cambodia to document the experiences and voices of local peacebuilders — religious and community leaders, artists, educators, activists, and genocide survivors — who, through their everyday peace efforts, continue to rebuild lives and relationships in the long shadow of violence. The film title reflects what I heard repeatedly in Cambodia.
The documentary was part of your master thesis, entitled “Toward a Local-Visual Turn: Understanding Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Cambodia through Documentary Filmmaking” and supervised by Professor Achim Wennmann. How did the film contribute to your thesis, and what was it like to be able to integrate multimedia elements into an academic work?
The film was not just a complement to my written thesis, it was central to it. Through it, I explored how filmmaking can deepen our understanding of peacebuilding, especially its “local” and “everyday peace” dimensions. I approached film as both a research method and a central outcome, placing it in dialogue with the written analysis. Integrating it opened new ways of studying and representing peace — challenging dominant narratives, capturing emotional and embodied dimensions that words alone can’t convey, and showing the places where local peace efforts unfold. Filmmaking itself became part of the peacebuilding process, leaving behind a visual archive that I hope will continue to spark dialogue and learning beyond academia.
We Forgive but We Don't Forget, which shows that peace is not a finished state, but an ongoing practice, will be premiering as part of the Geneva Peace Week 2025 in collaboration with the Geneva Graduate Institute — how does it feel to be sharing your work at a time when the world is facing more conflict than ever?
It feels urgent. When images of violence and conflict fill the headlines, it’s easy to feel that peace is unattainable: distant, fragile, and beyond our reach. Yet it’s precisely in such moments that we need to talk about it.
Too often, we picture peace as a grand political moment: leaders shaking hands or treaties being signed. But what happens after? How is peace nurtured and carried forward? This is where my documentary film steps in.
The film looks beyond those symbolic moments to the work of local peacebuilders in post-conflict Cambodia: the quiet, local, everyday efforts that rarely make the headlines but shape life after conflict. Screening the film at GPW 2025 feels especially meaningful because this year’s theme, Peace in Action, speaks directly to that essential work.
We Forgive but We Don't Forget is not your first documentary — can you tell us about « J'étais un enfant qu'on ne voyait pas » which you made in 2019?
The documentary « J'étais un enfant qu'on ne voyait pas » reports on a repressed chapter in Swiss social history from the perspective of those affected. Well into the 20th century, tens of thousands of children, adolescents, and adults were placed in foster care or admitted to closed institutions, despite their innocence. The exploitation and violence, both physical and emotional, experienced by foster children left a severe impact on many, which accompanied them for life.
I wanted to give voice to those whose stories had long remained unheard, to create a space where their memories could be shared and acknowledged, and to offer a form of relief for those who speak.
As with We Forgive but We Don’t Forget, film here becomes a space for dialogue, empathy, memory, and healing — even if the stories unfold in very different places and contexts. Above all, it becomes a way to make the invisible visible.