Posted on 01/01/2018 2:08:33 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
It’s not as if Angelina Jolie hasn’t proved her worth as a writer-director before now. Following on from the Bosnian war drama "In the Land of Blood and Honey," and "Unbroken’s" harrowing account of life in a second World War prisoner-of-war camp, Jolie’s fourth narrative feature, confirms her as an exquisite craftswoman and an artist capable of tackling geopolitical complexities.
"First They Killed My Father," the official Cambodian selection for the Academy Awards, is based on the memoir of the same name by Loung Ung, whom Jolie befriended in 2002 after the actor became a goodwill ambassador for the UN.
Ung (as essayed by the remarkable Sareum Srey Moch) is the five-year-old daughter of a Cambodian government official (a nuanced Phoeung Kompheak). As the Khmer Rouge’s campaign of genocide begins, Ung and her family are forced to flee Phnom Penh and toil in the fields, where zealous overseers bark slogans: “There will be no banking, no trading and no private property.”
Jolie stays entirely focused on her young heroine save for an archival overture featuring Richard Nixon. Ung has no real knowledge of the outside world. Her experiences are repetitive, brutal and tempered by naivety: hard labour, surviving on morsels and thin gruel, and finally the dissolution of her family. As the overseers have it: “Angkar is your mother and your father.”
Ironically, once she is conscripted as a child soldier and trained to fight (presumably against PRK communists in the civil war), her diet and living conditions improve.
Her short, horrific military career eventually brings her into a forest where, in a virtuoso sequence, she gingerly inches forward while landmines explode everyone around her into pieces.
Against these harrowing details, Jolie and director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire, Antichrist) have crafted a paradoxically balmy, handsome film.
This is both a personal and political project for the director; her 16-year-old Cambodian-born son, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, served as an executive producer.
Forty years on and the Cambodian genocide has seldom been depicted on film. The Killing Fields was a notable exception but even that exceptional project pivoted around Sam Waterson’s American journalist. Jolie has the clout and integrity to tell the story from a Cambodian perspective. Her ambitions and conviction are matched by an authenticity – a Khmer-speaking cast, hundreds on non-CGI extras – that can’t be manufactured. Sadly the film’s gravitas and subject matter was always likely to sink it at the box office. It has instead made its way to video on demand. A coup for Netflix, of course, but a loss for the theatrical circuit.
(bookmark)
I watched it a few months ago. Told all my Progressive friends about it because that is how a “workers’ utopia” really comes about. It’s not all flowery speeches and epiphanies like they think. Someone has to come and forcibly remove the middle class from their lives.
Thank you for posting this. I will definitely be watching this, and will let people know about it.
I saw it as well. It's mostly anti-Khmer Rouge but with some anti-Americanism thrown it.
>>It’s mostly anti-Khmer Rouge but with some anti-Americanism thrown it.
Yeah. The anti-America crap was mostly BS and probably necessary to get the film funded. After all, you can show the evils of communism if you spin it as Murrca’s Fault.
She got someone else to pay for his college.
Yeah, 'cause Nixon loved commies and it was his fault that the poor widdle Cambodian marxists went and killed all those people. Bashed their heads in with hammers and broken automobile crankshafts they did because bullets were considered too precious to waste when killing a mere human being.
Bkmrk.
That struck me as strange too. A 16 as an executive producer?
What does an executive producer do?
Their are those who do not agree
Nothing. The Producer raises the money and then pay themselves very well. That’s why you see stars now as producers, it’s just another way of getting them money.
bkmk
Obviously the writer never heard of "Journey From the Fall".........
Provides the money..........
She got someone else to pay for his college.
executive producer is an honorific given to somebody who has contributed or inspired in some way to the production. Either inspiring, providing some script edits, funding, to bringing the stars Starbucks each morning.
Big name directors are often billed as executive producers.
Sirius, Jolie handled portrayal of our WWII POW vets in “Unbroken” beautifully...
Think: if someone were to do a movie about the atomic bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the eyes of a Japanese child...no matter how “right” the decision was: war is war.
I don’t think the movie has anti-American agenda. But...there are times in history when the lines between good and evil get blurry because even the cost for good to ultimately triumph, can be so great. (And bloody.)
As I said in a prior post:
Imagine if someone were to do a movie about the atomic bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the eyes of a Japanese child...no matter how “right” the decision was: war is war.
There are times in history when the lines between good and evil get blurry because even the cost for good to ultimately triumph, can be so great. (And bloody.)
And even the best of leaders and men are fallible. (Nixon’s entire presidency attested to this. Great and accomplished, but fallible.)
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