It's powerful: Reviewing Angelina Jolie's new Cambodia movie

Of the various kinds of films to address genocide, the biopic is probably the most familiar. We’ve all seen them: “based on a true story”, popular but prestigious, making a vast atrocity comprehensible through the eyes of an individual. The Killing Fields (1984), Schindler’s List (1994) and Hotel Rwanda (2004) are all classic examples, though there are much earlier ones – Ravished Armenia introduced Western audiences to the Armenian genocide as long ago as 1919, for instance.

Angelina Jolie’s new film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, fits into this subgenre in many ways. On general international release on Friday September 14, simultaneously in cinemas and Netflix, it is an adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir of the same name from 2000. The book was an unsettlingly beautiful yet harrowing chronicle of a young girl’s experience under the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror from 1975-79.
Like many other historical dramas, “based on a true story” is not the only way in which Jolie secures the film’s authenticity. Ung contributed to the promotion of the film, and even appeared in it at the end – recalling Schindler’s List’s pairing of actual survivors with their actor counterparts.

The promotional materials make clear that the film was shot on location in Cambodia, and that producer, Rithy Panh, is a survivor of the genocide himself. He has made several ground-breaking documentaries about the atrocities, plus his own cinematic memoir, The Missing Picture (2013). And finally, Jolie is not entirely an outsider – she was spurred to her humanitarian work after filming Tomb Raider (2001) in Cambodia, and also has a son from the country (who has a credit as a producer on the new movie).
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