Hope for Friends

Workaholic American actress Leslie Hope and her cinematographer husband Adam Kane have put their weight behind the Friends International organisation that does such great work on behalf of the street kids of Cambodia, with their short 30-minute film What I See When I Close My Eyes. The film follows the street living and working kids of Phnom Penh as they paint life sized self-portraits and tell their stories in their own words of what they saw when they closed their eyes. It consists almost entirely of children talking about themselves, their lives, their hopes and their dreams. Their visions range from the heart-breakingly simple dream of a young girl to have soap, to the bold dream of a teenage boy to help drug addicts kick their habit and find work. Hope, who has appeared in countless film and tv roles, is the movie's writer-director, with husband Kane in charge of filming. The couple visited Cambodia in 2005 to shoot the movie, which was shown at the Los Angeles Show Off Your Short Film Festival last month. Link: Friends.