From Cambodia’s killing fields to the world stage, Chanrithy Him transforms from child survivor into award-winning author, international speaker, and social justice activist, challenging powerful leaders over the forces that helped shatter her homeland.

SYNOPSIS:

CONCEPT: A feature adaptation of Chanrithy Him’s internationally acclaimed, award-winning memoir When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge (W.W. Norton, 2000), set in Cambodia and the United States across the turbulent late 1960s, the Khmer Rouge era, and its long aftermath.

THE MEET: All the President’s Men meets The Killing Fields, through the eyes of a child survivor who refuses to be silenced.

TAGLINE: God created Heaven and Earth in six days. In one night, the United States and the Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into hell. One child survived to tell the story.

SYNOPSIS:

CHANRITHY HIM is born into a loving Cambodian family, a spirited child known as “Athy,” growing up in a world of warmth, tradition, and quiet beauty. But as political tensions rise and foreign powers collide over Southeast Asia, her childhood innocence begins to fracture.

When the Khmer Rouge seizes power, Athy’s life is violently upended. Forced from her home and separated from everything she knows, she and her family are driven into a brutal regime where starvation, forced labor, and constant fear become daily existence. One by one, the people she loves—her father, her siblings, her mother—are taken from her, leaving her to navigate a world where trust is dangerous and survival demands silence.

Yet even as her body weakens, Athy’s inner life deepens. Guided by memory, faith, and the spiritual presence of those she has lost, she refuses to surrender her humanity. Under a punishing sun in the labor camp, a cruel brigade leader drives the sick, dehydrated Athy beyond the limits of her strength; she calls out to her parents’ spirits, then prays to God—and the sky suddenly darkens. Rain falls in dense, punishing drops. Wind tears across the fields. The guards flee, and the children are spared. Through illness, punishment, and repeated brushes with death, she clings to a fragile belief that her life has purpose—that somehow, she must survive.

Against all odds, she does.

Reborn in America, Chanrithy builds a new life from the ashes of unimaginable loss. She becomes an award-winning author, international speaker, and social justice activist, giving voice to a genocide the world once ignored. But survival is not the end of her journey.

Haunted by memory and driven by a need for truth, she returns to Cambodia decades later—no longer a powerless child, but a woman determined to confront the past.

That confrontation reaches its peak when Chanrithy stands before thousands and challenges former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, demanding accountability for the geopolitical decisions that helped devastate her homeland. In that moment, the frightened child who once prayed for survival becomes a voice that cannot be silenced.

When Broken Glass Floats is the story of one girl’s journey through war, loss, and spiritual endurance—and her transformation into a woman who dares to speak truth to power, reclaim history, and honor the millions who never had the chance.

WHEN BROKEN GLASS FLOATS