This Sunday, New York Times photographer Dith Pran passed away at age 65. Pran was known for his work spreading the word about his native land, Cambodia:

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians “” a third of the population “” were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. His credo: Make no move unless there was a 50-50 chance of not being killed.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists. [The New York Times]

His story came to the big screen in 1984’s The Killing Fields. The film looks at Pran’s relationship with his good friend and contact at the New York Times Sydney H. Schanberg :

In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Schanberg recalled Mr. Dith’s theory of photojournalism: “You have to be a pineapple. You have to have a hundred eyes.”

“I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Mr. Schanberg said. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.” [The New York Times]

For more on Dith Pran, go HERE to watch a great New York Times video about his life and his work. The trailer for The Killing Fields is below and be sure to to help bring aid to Cambodia today.