ANGELINA JOLIE’S NEW FILM
In her fourth feature as a director, First They Killed My Father, Angelina Jolie delivers her most assured film yet. Among the fans: the country of Cambodia, which has selected the Netflix docudrama as its official nominee for the Oscars, a first for the Academy Awards.
Beginning with archival footage that suggests America was complicit in the tragedy that unfolded in Cambodia during and after the Vietnam War, Jolie, who has held dual US-Cambodian citizenship since 2005, makes her stance clear at the outset. First with a bombing campaign and then by abandoning the anti-communist government in 1975, Washington paved the way for the wholesale slaughter of 1.5-3 million people by the Khmer Rouge. Working with Cambodian-French filmmaker Rithy Panh and sharing writing credits with Loung Ung, whose memoir of the same title inspired the film, Jolie focuses on the period of the revolutionary government’s worst excesses—from 1975 to 1979.
In an affecting performance, nine-year-old Sareum
Srey Moch portrays Loung as a mostly silent, wide-eyed spectator to the horror as she toils in the fields, eventually joining in the killing as a child soldier. With sparse dialogue and vivid, sometimes graphic, scenes, Jolie depicts a family that loses everything, showing the forced migration from the comforts of the city to hard labour and starvation in the countryside.
She juxtaposes flashbacks to the grand past against the grim present to evoke a sense of drastic deterioration, mostly succeeding in avoiding melodrama with a simple docudrama approach—perhaps a consequence of her long association with the UNHCR.
Though she blames American cynicism for facilitating the genocide, the film is finally an indictment of the Khmer’s rigid revolutionary ideology— which ushered in a brutal dictatorship under the guise of refuting colonialism and capitalism. Regardless of how unequal the society might have been before the revolution, the film makes viewers wonder how a country can be so ruthless toward its own citizens. In the current era of divide and rule, there’s a lesson for all in Cambodia’s horror.