Angelina channels power of family

The award-winning actress’ latest film ‘First They Killed My Father’ represents an amalgamation of her multifarious life

Angelina Jolie arrives for an interview with the familiar harried air of a parent who has just barely managed to withdraw from her children, all six of whom she’s left having breakfast upstairs in their Toronto hotel suite. “The reason I was a little late is they made me change,” Jolie says, smiling. “They thought what I was wearing was too revealing.”

It’s just another example of the extreme balancing act of Jolie’s life, one which combines global celebrity with humanitarian devotion, A-list stardom with sober filmmaking, glamour and family. “I actually went to a premiere once with pee on me,” she says. “It was when the kids were little and I just got peed on at the last minute. There was nothing to do but wear it.”

But Jolie’s latest film, the powerfully immersive Cambodian genocide drama First They Killed My

Father, represents a kind of amalgamation of Jolie’s multifarious life. Her initial interest in Cambodia came when she arrived to make Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2000. She became infatuated with the country and its people, began goodwill work for the UN’s refugee agency and adopted her first child, Maddox, from Cambodia.

First They Killed My Father, which is now streaming on Netflix, is based on Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir. The film hues close to Ung’s perspective as a five-year-old girl living with her family in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge march in, force the residents to flee and then imprison Ung’s family in a labour camp, brutally indoctrinating them to a classless society. Some two million (nearly a quarter of the country) died during the Khmer Rouge’s four year reign of terror.

The film isn’t just a shattering view of war through a child’s eyes, it’s intended as a cathartic healing for Cambodia itself, and a personal journey into the past of Maddox’s countrymen. The 16-year-old, credited as an executive producer, collaborated with her mother on the production, which was shot in Cambodia with local actors, both professional and not.

“I said to my son Maddox, who’s known Loung his whole life, when you’re ready, we should tell Loung’s story. But we have to tell it together,” Jolie says. “We had this script for a few years and he came up to me and said, ‘I’m ready.’”

Jolie’s heavily-watched appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival was her most public since she filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after 12 years together. Jolie acknowledged it’s been a difficult period of transition and that her filmmaking has been put on pause. She has an acting gig lined up (Maleficent 2) but the years-long work of directing has for now been tabled. “I’ve needed to take over a year off just to be with my kids,” Jolie says. “All I’ve done is some of my humanitarian work and my teaching. I’ve done nothing else for over a year. Now that they’re all older, the decisions really have to be made together because they home school and they’ll be with me and they have a lot of opinions about what to do.”

Now that her children are getting older, Jolie hopes that the other children will work with her, too. “I think all the kids eventually want to do something. My little boy who’s nine said he wants to train me because he thinks I’m out of shape. So maybe I’ll just be working with my children,” says Jolie, joking but also delighted about the idea: a closeknit, globe-trotting clan of moviemaking adventurers, schooled in classrooms in Cambodian rice fields and African plains.

Ung, 47, came to Vermont from a refugee camp in Thailand as a 10-year-old. She now is married and lives in Cleveland, but she and Jolie have long been friends. She and Jolie co-wrote the script.

“There’s probably a Hollywood version of this, but this wasn’t about that,” says Ung. “This was about honour and celebration and remembrance.”

Ung’s experience may represent Cambodia’s, but First They Killed My Father is also an indelibly heart-wrenching story about a family torn apart by war, yet unbroken. “Even when the soldiers told us my parents were enemies of the state, I knew they loved me and I loved them. There was never a question about that,” says Ung. “After I lost them, what they said to me at a young age, their spirits continue to say to me. I continue to be raised by my parents.”