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PCHC-MOM endeavours to make our events accessible to all - all are welcome. Join us for an afternoon of powerful storytelling, a documentary film screening, and a potluck reception celebrating the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities in the Lower Mainland.
If this event moves you, consider making a donation to help PCHC – Museum of Migration bring stories like these to our community. All donations receive a charitable tax receipt.
Event Overview
This book launch and film screening will highlight first-hand accounts of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees who settled in Canada, contributing to the well-being and strength of their new home and country. These are stories which echo how courage and resiliency can place people on migration journeys they never thought they would take, from the past to the present.
“I rarely have the chance to learn about the journey, experiences, and challenges faced by my parents’ generation. Hearts of Freedom provides new perspectives on childhood memories, answering many inner questions. It is an immensely valuable resource.” - Som Phouangpraseuth, former president, Lao Association of Ottawa Valley
This film screening and book launch is in partnership with Hearts of Freedom (HOF), Canadian Mennonite University (CMU), and Pacific Canada Heritage Centre -Museum of Migration.
Schedule
🗓️ Date & Time: Saturday, June 6, 2026 - 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
📍 Venue: St. Matthew’s Parish 16079 - 88th Avenue, Surrey, BC (Google Maps)
About the Book
Between 1975 and 1997 some three million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians fled atrocities in their home countries, with over 210,000 resettling in Canada. While this history is partly known to some Canadians, little has been written about it, especially from the perspectives of the refugees themselves.
Hearts of Freedom is a rich oral history based on interviews with 145 former refugees, sharing deeply moving accounts of oppression, concentration camps, genocide, and perilous escapes over land and sea. Survivors reflect on their first impressions of Canada – the unfamiliar snow and cold, the unexpected kindness of neighbours, and occasional encounters with racism. Through their experiences, we come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Canada’s refugee programs. These stories reveal how refugees’ attachment to Canada grew over the years and how multiculturalism policies facilitated that.
Ordinary Canadians played a decisive role in the first mass refugee movement through newly created private sponsorship programs – a role for which the United Nations awarded the Nansen Medal to the Canadian people in 1986. Coming at a time when we are assessing the benefits of immigration and refugee policies and programs, Hearts of Freedom documents the lives and contributions of people who have suffered the worst excesses of war to rebuild their lives in Canada.
About the Film
"Passage to Freedom" is a 2022 Canadian documentary film, directed by Sheila Petzold, describing firsthand the dire conditions faced by Southeast Asian refugees who embarked on perilous voyages from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to Canada.
The film is produced by Hearts of Freedom, a major oral history research project based at Carleton University that includes 173 video-taped interviews of former refugees from these three countries, government officials, and Canadian sponsors who welcomed them.
Through a skillful interweaving of archival footage, news reports, and interviews with former refugees and Canadian immigration officials, the film vividly portrays the escape journeys and resettlement of some of the over 100,000 Southeast Asian refugees in Canada between 1975 and 1985. It remains the largest and most successful refugee immigration project in Canada’s history. The Canadian response to the refugee crisis was internationally recognized with the UNHRC Nansen Medal in 1986.
