Jolie Pitt returns to Cambodia as she directs new film
BATTAMBANG, Cambodia — Between bites of spicy Cambodian curry and fried fish with rice, Angelina Jolie Pitt explain show this tiny country with a tumultuous past changed the course of her life.
She first visited Cambodia 16 years ago to port ray “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”— the gun-toting, bungee-jumping, supremely toned action hero thatmade her a star. Soonafter, she adopted her first child from a Cambodian orphan age and returned again and again on humanitarian missions. Now, she’s back for another movie but this time as a director, andthe subjectmatter is a far cry from Lara Croft.
“First They Killed My Father” is based on a Khmer Rouge memoir written by survivor Loung Ung that recounts the 1970s Cambodian genocide froma child’s perspective. The film, which she is directing and co-wrote with Ung for Netflix, is in Khmer, with an all-Cambodian cast, and according to Jolie Pitt is “themost important” movie of her career.
“When I first came to Cambodia, it changed me. It changed my perspective. I realized therewas so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand, and I was very humbled by it ,” said the 40-year-old Jolie Pitt, who grew up in Los Angeles where she felt “a real emptiness.”
Shewas struck by the graciousness and warmth of Cambodian people, despite the tragedy that left anestimated 2 million people dead. While shooting Lara Croft in2000, some scenes required sidestepping land mines, she said, which made her aware of thedangers refugees face in countries ravaged by war. “That trip triggered my realization of how little I knew and the beginning of my search for that knowledge.”
It prompted her to contact the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to learn about the agency’ s work before joining as a goodwill ambassador in 2001. Shewas then given an expanded role as Special Envoy in 2012.
It was during an early trip back to Cambodia with the U.N. that Jolie had another epiphany — this time about mother hood.
“It’s strange, I never wanted tohave ababy. I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babys at. I never thought of myself as a mother,” Jolie, now famously a mother of six, says with a laugh. Butwhile playing with children at a Cambodian school, “it was suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere.”
She adopted Maddox in 2002, and a year later opened a foundation in his name in northwestern Battambang province, which helps fund health care, education and conservation projects in rural Cambodia.
Maddox is now14 and sporting what his mom calls “a blonde stripe” — a shaggy mohawk with the top dyed blonde. He joined her in Cambodia to help behind the scenes for the project that she sees as a unique merger of her filmwork and family with humanitarian interests.
“For me, this is the moment, where finally my life is kind of in line, and I feel I’m finally where I should be,” Jolie Pitt said.
Her fondness for Cambodia is mutual, says the country’s most celebrated filmmaker Rithy Panh, who says “First They Killed My Father” will be the first Hollywood epic filmed in Cambodia about the country’s genocide — a sign that the government trusts her to respectfully revisit the horrors of the past.
“I don’t think they authorized Hollywood to come here. They authorized Angelina Jolie. It’s not the same. She is special. She has a special relationship with the Cambodian people. There is amutual respect,” said Panh, her co-producer.