Bringing together 110 photographers, including 50 Asian photographers to Siem Reap, the 6th edition of Angkor Photo Festival runs from 20th to 27th November. Angkor Photo Festival is unique among photography events in that it has strong educational objectives and is linked to various outreach projects aimed at improving the lives of Cambodian children. Here’s a selection of photos from the festival.

(Left) Opium Addiction in Badakhshan, Afghanistan by A.K. Kimoto

A.K. Kimoto was a 32-year-old Japanese photographer based in Bangkok, who died in March 2010 while traveling to Australia.

He spent years photographing families in the remote, Taliban-controlled northeastern mountains of Afghanistan. He roamed the settlements in Badakhshan to find out why so many of its inhabitants (even the young) had become addicted to opium.

Kimoto wrote: “When was the last time you saw a 4-year-old sucking down heroin? Is it not a tragedy? If I can’t do anything to bring attention to their plight, and if nobody cares, then what am I doing with my time and, in fact, my life?” His work can also be viewed at The New York Times’ LENS blog.

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A Woman's Eye

An image from one of the children participating in the photography workshop for Anjali House. International photographers tutor kids for a week, then they head out to the streets to take photos of their friends, family and community.

Anjali House is a centre in Siem Reap, Cambodia that provides a safe and happy educational environment for 80 children.

Two sisters inherit a profession, which has been done by the women of the family for generations. Belly dancing in Istanbul nightclubs since they were eleven, the sisters support their family through their daily performances. They sometimes work in five to six different clubs a night.

One of the sisters is now a celebrity in a television show. The other still dances in clubs.

Photo by Burcu Göknar

Gali Tibbon’s photography focuses on the theme of religion, pilgrimage and ritual – documenting the various Christian denominations in Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, baptism in the Jordan River, and ancient Samaritans, among others.

Left: Worshippers hold up candles as they gather in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for the Orthodox ceremony of the Holy Fire.

Photo by Gali Tibbon

"Inner Face" deals with homosexuality in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In his work, Gazi Nafis explores the forbidden relationships between gay workers who live in boarding houses in the city.

He writes, “The dreams of our society and those of our own are not always the same. Society wants to confine us within the limits of its sense of propriety, to its sense of gender identity. But we want our dreamscapes to be our own, where we will have endless freedom, our own values, free expression of our thoughts and emotions.”

Photo by Gazi Nafis

Bae, 80, a former sex worker for US servicemen lowers her face to hide her identity. in her small room in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. She has been suffering asthma for the past seven years and lives on a government subsidy of USD 400 a month.

After decades living as pariahs, some women have begun speaking about their experience as prostitutes in camp towns constructed around American military bases in the country. The women are seeking an apology and compensation from the government.

“Comfort women” – Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army – is a term that evokes resentment amongst South Koreans.

Some say that the Korean and American governments also condoned and even helped manage a network of women from the 1950s to 1970s.

Photo by Jean Chung

“There is so much land here, but there is not a single piece for us. Maybe it is not in our destiny."

So say the women of the Musahar community around Sapahi VDC of Bara. They have spent their lives working for landlords, yet remain as impoverished as ever.

Over the last few decades, the landless people here have built meager huts to for themselves and their children. They have been here for all or most of their lives, but have no formal title to the land they live on.

Society and state has sidelined these people, but there is no shortage of those who wish to exploit their plight for political gain.

Photo by Kishor Sharma

Yi people is one of the 55 minorities in China. Sichuan Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, lying in the Daliangshan Mountain is the biggest Yi compact community.

The adverse circumstances and poor living conditions threaten their lives. However, the brave and resourceful Yi people have fought to survive amid the crags and harsh climate.

Li Lang writes, “I wish to preserve the original Yi culture and customs through my lens and photos.”

Photo by Li Lang

Under heavy gunfire, monks carry an injured United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) member to safety on Rachadamuri Rd during the military crackdown against UDD demonstrators in May 2010.

Masaru Goto is a photojournalist and director of Guevara New York/Creative Media Agency.

Photo by Masaru Goto

Red mud wrestlers train at a wrestling school in Kolhapur, India. Kushti is an ancient version of wrestling which is about 3,000 years old. It originated in India and spread out to Iran and the Middle East. It is still practiced in pockets of India but Kolhapur in India's west is today the main centre of the art, where all the best fighters, trainers and "Achaea" or wrestling schools are to be found.

Photo by Palani Mohan/Reportage by GETTY IMAGES

Soviet era industrialisation program and petroleum-related production created an environmental crisis both in the Caspian Sea and Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital city. The economy’s heavy dependence on the oil sector brought people from the villages into the city in search for work. As a result, nearly 4,000,000 people, half of the country’s population now lives in Baku, which is imploding with overpopulation and urban decay. In 2008, Forbes magazine named Baku as the most polluted city in the world.

This project documents communities in Baku and suburbs – what has now become a sprawling Oil Village. People live here dangerously, in hazardous environments and amongst industrial ruin. In the suburbs of the city they inhabit makeshift homes, oil fields and abandoned factories.

Photo by Rena Effendi/Institute of Artist Management

Divided by 17,000 islands and located in the Pacific Ring of Fire, Indonesia is home to more than 150 active volcanoes, distinctly marked by a coastline spanning over 80,000 km. The mountains and the sea have been an integral and essential part of Indonesians, culturally, economically and spiritually.

Rony Zakaria documents an ongoing history of people and communities whose lives are directly affected by two major entities: the mountains and the sea.

Photo by Rony Zakaria

Saori Ninomiya took her first black and white photographs in 1987. She started her project, “From That Place – The Voice of Being,” in 2007, photographing victims of rape. She approaches each subject through an open and honest dialogue, and hopes that the project will be a constant reminder to society of their presence among us.

She writes, “I ask them to stand in front of my camera. It is here that healing takes place.”

Photo by Saori Ninomiya

Sean Lee writes, “Photography gives me the opportunity to be somebody else, allowing me to do things I've always been afraid to do. As I'm in absolute control of both the subject and the eventual result, restrictions do not exist for me. The boundaries that permeate my everyday life are pushed to the extremes in my photography.”

Photo by Sean Lee

“There is no work now. If big companies like Toyota are firing people, why should there be any work here for us? If big banks in the U.S. collapse, why should there be any work here for us?”, says Hiroshi Nakao, 59-year-old, former construction day labourer, who currently survives by picking through garbage and selling what he can. He is one of the hundreds of graying men in Kamagasaki, Osaka, Japan which used to be a thriving labourer’s town.

Today it is home to about 25,000 mainly elderly former day labourers. An estimated 1,300 of them are homeless. Now called a “welfare town” – a dumping ground of old men. Alcoholism, poverty, suicide, tuberculosis and loneliness prevail here. They don’t have family ties and live and die alone as social outcasts.

Photo by Shiho Fukada

Sinxay Thavixay, in his series of tightly-framed portraits evokes the modern history of Laos through the faces of its people.

Photo by Sinxay Thavixay

Left: Women belonging to three generations of a tribal family in Pati Block in Badwani district in Madhya Pradesh. The men migrate to cities or go to nearby towns to look for employment, as there is none available in the region.

Pati is one of the poorest places in India where the minimum wage is just 61.37 rupees per day or less than two dollars.

Photo by Sohrab Hura

"Sites of Terror" traces the sites of serial bomb blasts that shook Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat State, in India, killing 49 people and injuring more than 150. Suruchi Dumpawar’s work is a reflection on the horrifying past juxtaposed with the banal landscape of the present.

Left: Thakkarbapa Nagar: A contract labourer was returning home from work when the bomb exploded in the Bapunagar area leaving him dead.

Photo by Suruchi Dumpawar/LUCIDA

Taslima Akhter delves into the unexplored woes of garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh – both in their home and in the factories. Since 1980s, 76 per cent of the country’s earnings came from the garment industry. Eighty per cent of the workers are women.

One of Taslima's photos shows the cramped workers’ quarters. Ten to twelve family members are squeezed into a single room because they cannot afford a bigger place.

Photo by Taslima Akhter

"A Race Divided" is a documentary project that shows the lives of illegal Burmese migrants in the mountainous region of Mizoram, northeast India.

Today, there are at least 70,000 Chin migrants living in Mizoram primarily because of human rights abuse by the military since it came to power in 1962. They have crossed the border, illegally joining the hundreds of thousands of other ethnic Burmese trying to escape the oppression in their native land. In Mizoram, it would be hard for someone to tell who are the Mizos from the Chins. But if one would take a closer study, the ethnic rift would be obvious just around the main market area of the city’s capital Aizwal: Mizos own the nifty shops selling imported goods and electronic gadgets; and the Chins are those on the side streets selling whatever crop they have harvested for the day, usually to buy their family's next meal.

Photo by Veejay Villafranca

In Tibet, there is an overwhelming sense of history and a stark beauty in the landscape. There is also, always, an invisible line between communities and people. A line neither side, Tibetan or Chinese, dared to cross, but were forced to negotiate in order to survive today in the hope of a better future.

Tibetans see the movement of people to the plateau as an attempt to diminish their claims to the land of their ancestors. Vidura Jang Bahadur’s photos show this form of subversion as it extends to education, popular culture and religion – an attempt to end a way of life.

He writes, “To quote Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese author, ‘In China, there is a saying; that which is united will eventually separate, and that which is separated will eventually reunite.’ If so, Tibet’s eventual separation from China is inevitable. Till then, the Tibetans wait patiently, their desire for freedom articulated succinctly by an elderly gentleman I met in Lhasa: “...our Gandhi will come one day...”

Photo by Vidura Jang Bahadur

Vinai Dithajohn's work focuses on the political unrest in Bangkok which happened in May of this year.

Other "Bangkok Unrest" photographers include: Athit Perawongmetha and Paula Bronstein for Getty Images; Patrick de Noirmont, new-pictures.com; Agnes Dherbeys; Masaru Goto; Roland Neveu; and Kosuke Okahara.

Photo by Vinai Dithajohn

In a rapidly modernizing China, the rural heartland and its inhabitants are often overlooked. A skewed demographic of mostly the very old and very young in villages contrasts with the ever-growing floating populations of unemployed youth descending on city-centres. Like communities who have lost their young men to war, this toothless and infant-dominated population is left to fend for itself amidst a swathe of cross-provincial issues like climate change, water pollution, and the rising cost of land.

Ying Ang photographed her family’s homestead in Hainan Island where seven generations of blood relatives live and continue to do so.

Photo by Ying Ang