Saturday, September 2, 2017







Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday, Angelina Jolie’s new movie, First They Killed My Father reached the end of a journey that began more than 17 years ago, and with a very different sort of project: the action movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which Jolie filmed in Cambodia.“I was struck by how ignorant I was,” Jolie said of her first visit to the country. She would eventually return there on United Nations missions, and in 2002 she adopted her oldest son, Maddox, from an orphanage in Battambang. Wanting to learn more on that first trip, Jolie bought a $2 book on a street corner, Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir of surviving the Khmer Rouge, which the filmmaker later adapted into First They Killed My Father.

“I thought, what matters to me?” Jolie said, during a Q&A with Ung following the movie’s North American premiere (distributor Netflix held its world premiere in Cambodia in February). “I wanted my son to know who his countrymen are.”
Jolie’s movie begins with news footage of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger making political decisions that would rock the Southeast Asian country, before Jolie shifts perspective to that of five-year-old Ung, played by Sareum Srey Moch, as the Khmer Rouge comes to power in 1975. Shooting from a child’s eye view, Jolie’s camera reveals a pair of baby’s shoes taken by a soldier, a fistful of stolen rice, a nuzzle on a father’s shoulder.

Filming hundreds of children in the Khmer language of Cambodia, with a largely Cambodian crew, Jolie said one of her chief challenges on the set was not re-traumatizing the survivors whose story she hoped to tell. “Suddenly you have 300 Khmer soldiers coming down the streets with guns and you don’t know a movie is being made,” she said. The production employed therapists on set and set up a roadblock to explain to locals what was happening., she said

While the era First They Killed My Father depicts is the darkest imaginable, Jolie’s camera lingers often on images of beauty -- lotus flowers, rice paddies, monks’ bright orange robes. The beauty is both a break for the audience and a choice that was important to Ung. “My Cambodia isn’t black and white pictures of graves and skulls,” Ung said. “My Cambodia is so green... it’s monks, it’s smiles.”
Jolie said she sees the film’s relevance in contemporary conflicts. “You see a vacuum, a rise in extremism, misinformation… little girls feeling like they’re completely left alone,” Jolie said. “[In the movie], I hope what you see is… how people come through, all the little Luongs out there.”
When asked by moderator Peter Sellars, a theater director, if her work visiting refugees as a UN ambassador was essential to directing the movie, Jolie injected some lightness into the room, still thick with the audience’s response. “It helps if you’re going to make this kind of film,” Jolie said. “It’s not good for comedies.”
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