Siem Reap, Cambodia – Angelina Jolie’s production of “First They Killed My Father” premiered Saturday evening in Cambodia at the Angkor Wat temple complex.
The film is the first Hollywood-backed production to be shot entirely in the region with local actors and crew.
The movie is based on a memoir of the same name by Luong Ung about her life as a child under the infamous Khmer Rouge regime that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979 and killed 2 million people.
“I read Luang’s book many years ago and it was one of the early books that I read that helped me to open my eyes to different things happening the world that I didn’t know about,” Jolie told reporters at a press conference on Saturday.
She said the story of war and destruction is particularly powerful because it comes from a child’s perspective.
“I wanted to film her story because as much as there have been many beautiful films made about this time in history … I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of the child and I wanted to walk through this story with a different point of view. I wanted to focus not just on war but on the love of family and on the beauty of the country,” she said.
Angelina Jolie in Athens, Greece on March 16, 2016. (Credit Image: © Wassilios Aswestopoulos/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press Photo: Wassilios Aswestopoulos)
Jolie has regularly visited Cambodia for 17 years since she first shot “Tomb Raider” in 2000. She adopted her first son Maddox from Cambodia 2002 and was awarded honorary citizenship in 2003, in part for her nature conservation efforts.
“First They Killed My Father” was shot on location in Cambodia between November 2015 and February 2016.
For the production, Jolie hired 3,500 Cambodian extras as well as first time actors such as 9-year-old lead Sareum Srey Much, who portrays Luong Ung.
Jolie said it was “extraordinary” to see Srey Much and co-star Mun Kimhak learn how to express themselves in emotionally complex scenes.
“I said to them early you never need to cry, you never need tears, you never need to laugh if you don’t feel like laughing just try to ‘be’,” she said.
“And they are just such natural talents that much of their emotional talents came forward.”
Veteran British journalist Jon Swain, who witnessed the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, said “his jaw dropped open” while watching an advance screening of the film.
“The scenes in this film of the evacuation of Phnom Penh, people being tipped out of the hospitals like garbage by the Khmer Rouge at gun point, being pushed down the street by their families with saline drips by their families into the countryside to die – I witnessed that,” he told dpa.
Swain is portrayed by Julian Sands in Hollywood’s other Khmer Rouge film, 1984’s Oscar-winning “The Killing Fields.”
“First They Killed My Father” will be released on Netflix in September 2017.
– dpa
