Darkness to Light: When Technology Heals Generations

NEW YORK, NY, October 27, 2025- At an intimate private screening held at Soho House New York, global fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg introduced the Oscar®-qualifying short documentary Darkness to Light: When Technology Heals Generations, written, directed, and produced by Victoria Bousis.

“The realism and emotion of Darkness to Light touched something deeply personal,” von Furstenberg said. “It reminded me of my own mother’s survival during the Holocaust.”

The event honored the Greek-American filmmaker and technologist whose work merges cinematic storytelling with virtual reality to explore memory, empathy, and collective healing. Executive Producer Elodie Yung (CAA) joined Boussis in presenting the film, which marks the 50th anniversary of the Cambodian genocide.

A Promise Fulfilled

Inspired by Bousis’s Rolling Stone article “If Tiles Could Speak, They Would Scream” and her award-winning VR experience Stay Alive My Son, the film follows her return to Cambodia to fulfill a vow made to survivor Yathay Pin, author of the memoir Stay Alive My Son.

“This film began as a promise,” said Bousis. “I told Yathay that I would never let the loss of his family or his country’s story fade into silence”

At the heart of the story is a 14-year-old Cambodian girl, representing a new generation confronting a legacy of unspoken trauma. Through VR, she steps into Pin’s memories his imprisonment, his grief, and ultimately his atonement bridging time, empathy, and rebirth.

Cambodia’s Unhealed Wounds

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge, a revolutionary communist regime led by Pol Pot, attempted to create a classless agrarian state known as Democratic Kampuchea. Cities were emptied, families torn apart, and religion, money, and education abolished. Nearly 1.7 million Cambodians a quarter of the population—died from starvation, forced labor, or execution.

(Historical background: (U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum  BBC History, Yale Cambodia Genocide Program)

While films such as The Killing Fields have chronicled this tragedy through testimony and archive, Darkness to Light and filmmaker, Eleni Bousis is a game changer by allowing audiences to enter the memory itself, transforming historical education into “visceral” empathy.

Technology as Empathy

Narrated by Eleni Bousis, the film combines vérité footage, survivor accounts, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the VR reconstruction process. Viewers are invited to walk through the memories of a father who lost his son, to feel the pain, separation, loss of his sin, witness endurance, and experience forgiveness.

“Technology can be our bridge to compassion,” Bousis noted. “When we see through another’s eyes, we begin to heal what history divided.”

Executive Producer Elodie Yung, who portrays Any, Pin’s wife, said the role resonated with her own family’s history of survival. “This project became a tribute to every mother forced to make impossible choices in times of war,” Yung reflected.

A Global Call to Remember

Darkness to Light has officially qualified for the 2025 Academy Awards® in the Documentary Short category and continues to earn global acclaim for its fusion of art and technology.

Learn more: https://www.ume.ai/darkness-to-light-when-technology-heals-generations/