UN travel opened up Jolie’s eyes to conflict

OSCAR-WINNING actress Angelina Jolie says she never intended to step behind the camera, but travelling around the world for the UN opened her eyes to the conflicts that have inspired many of her most recent films.

“I never thought I could make a movie or direct,” Jolie told an audience at the Toronto Film Festival, which is screening her Cambodian film First They Killed My Father and Afghan film The Breadwinner.

Jolie said her first major film as a director, the 2011 Bosnian war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey, was prompted by her humanitarian work as a special envoy for the UN’s refugee agency.

“I wanted to learn more about the war of Yugoslavia. I had been in the region and travelling in the UN. It was a war I couldn’t get my head around… It was not a goal to become a director.”

The Breadwinner, an animated film she produced, is about a young Afghan girl who cuts her hair and poses as a boy to feed her family.

It “tells the sad reality of many girls having to work and not go to school”, said Jolie, who has made several trips to Afghanistan. “The people I have met over the years are my heroes. The nice thing about being a director is to champion other people.”

Jolie said First They Killed My Father, was inspired by wanting to learn more about the history of Cambodia, the birthplace of her son Maddox, one of her six children.

The film, screened in Cambodia earlier this year, tells the story of a young girl during the 1970s genocide who is forced to toil in rice paddies and take up arms as a child soldier.

Jolie, 42, shrugged off her status as a role model for women. “I have a lot to learn and need role models myself.”– Reuters