Khmer Rouge era at center of film by Angelina Jolie

TORONTO — Angelina Jolie arrived for an interview with the air of a harried parent who had just barely managed to withdraw from her children, all six of whom she left eating breakfast in their Toronto hotel suite.

“The reason I was a little late is they made me change,” Jolie, 42, said smiling. “They thought what I was wearing was too revealing.”

The anecdote served as 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.

Jolie’s latest film, the powerfully immersive Cambodian genocide drama “First They Killed My Father,” represents a kind of amalgamation of Jolie’s diverse life.

Her initial interest in Cambodia came when she arrived — in a much earlier life — to make “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” in 2000. She became infatuated with the country and its people, began goodwill work for the U.N.’s refugee agency and adopted her first child, Maddox, from Cambodia.

“First They Killed My Father,” available for streaming on Netflix, is based on Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir.

The film hues closely to Ung’s perspective as a 5-year-old girl living with her family in Phnom Penn when the Khmer Rouge march in, force many residents to flee and imprison Ung’s family in a labor camp, brutally indoctrinating them to a classless society.

Some 2 million people (nearly a quarter of the country’s population) died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, from 1975 to ’79.

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 his 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 said.

“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 recent Toronto International Film Festival was her most public since she filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after 12 years together — two of them married. Jolie acknowledged it’s been a difficult period and her filmmaking has been on pause.

“I’ve needed to take over a year off just to be with my kids,” Jolie said. “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.”

Ung, 47, came to Vermont from a refugee camp in Thailand as a 10-year-old. She now is married and lives in Shaker Heights, a suburb of 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,” Ung said. “This was about honor and celebration and remembrance.”