As always, the news of the week from Cambodia is like a Clint Eastwood movie ... it's the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'll move through them in some sort of sequence, but don't expect the good guys to win before riding off into the sunset.

Not Spaghetti Western material by any means, this story about the Cambodian National Theatre is great, and announces performances this weekend at the Barbican in London.

One cultural sphere that suffered particularly badly was Cambodia's 1,000-year-old dance tradition. Before the rise of the Khmer Rouge, there were about 30 troupes performing Lakhaon Kaol, the intricate, masked, all-male sacred form that boasts 4,000 gestures in its movement vocabulary. It was a tradition that existed exclusively in the minds and muscles of the masters who practised it - and thus was almost entirely obliterated during the Pol Pot genocide.

After the regime fell, the government launched a nationwide radio campaign to unearth surviving masters of the Kaol. The library of thousands of gestures was pieced together, like fragments of shattered earthenware. Even so, only a handful of the original companies were re-established, and these only on an ad hoc basis to perform for weddings and funerals.

So, when it came to staging Weyreap's Battle - the first major Kaol production in more than 30 years - the challenges were huge. "We travelled to tiny villages, only accessible by boat," says Fred Frumberg of Amrita. "We tracked down forgotten masters and brought them to the city to make the piece."

Here's another article that tells a personal story of a member of the dance troop.

And while we're talking about show biz, Socheata Peouv's film, "New Year Baby", has shown at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival.

Winner of Amnesty International's 'Movies that Matter' Human Rights Award and the best documentary prize at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, "New Year Baby" documents a family visit to Cambodia where parents share their experiences of the Khmer Rouge years with their grown daughter.

A window into the lives of six Cambodians who escape the Khmer Rouge genocide and become Americans.

PBS is including the film in their "Independent Lens"series.

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