‘First’-hand look at horror under Khmer Rouge
Years ago Angelina Jolie went to Cambodia to make a movie and was never the same. The actress adopted a Cambodian boy, left her husband (Billy Bob Thornton) and became a different kind of celebrity — a crusader, advocate, spokeswoman.
Jolie’s “First They Killed My Father,” which is subtitled “A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” dramatizes one girl’s survival when the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot overthrew the U.S.-backed regime as the neighboring Vietnam war officially ended.
“First They Killed My Father” has a measured pace as it observes the world through 5-year-old Loung (a fantastically well cast Sareum Srey Moch, discovered in a local charity school).
Her loving family — with older sisters and brothers, mother and father — is upper-middle class. We see the arrival of the Khmer Rouge soldiers, who force the entire city to evacuate, telling them, “You must go to the country for three days. The U.S. will bomb the city.”
It’s the first of many lies as the Communist regime confiscates all valuables and commands everyone to go into the jungle, get berries and dye their clothes black to emphasize “equality.”
Morning-to-night Communist exhortations are heard on the speakers. Everyone is forced to work but their crops are taken elsewhere and hunger is real.
When Loung’s 9-yearold brother is caught stealing a pea he’s beaten.
Their father, we learn, was a soldier in the old regime and he knows that it’s only a matter of time before his true identity is discovered and he will be killed.
“First They Killed My Father” chronicles three horrible years and is adapted from Cambodian human rights activist Loung Ung’s memoir. Jolie filmed entirely on location in the Khmer language.
While the English subtitles are splendid, Jolie’s artful, gorgeously photographed study could be a silent-era epic, for it’s the faces that tell this story, which, although set in a distant past, echoes what’s happening today in Myanmar.