Angelina Jolie’s ‘First They Killed My Father’ Is a Plea to Remember Cambodia

Before her latest film as a director screened Monday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, Angelina Jolie introduced it with a kind of plea for North American audiences to watch it and to remember Cambodia, its history and its survivors. First They Killed My Father, subtitled “A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers” tells the true-life story of Loung Ung, whose same-titled memoir is the basis for the film. Netflix is distributing the film, which premieres on the streaming service this Friday, September 15th.

Ung was the daughter of a Cambodian government official when the brutal Khmer Rouge regime took control in 1975. Loung was five years old at the time, and she and her family — along with the entire population of the capital city of Phnom Penh — were marched out into the country to work in rice fields (the infamous “Killing Fields,” to cite another movie that was made about the Cambodian genocide) and later fight against invading Vietnamese soldiers.

Jolie’s film begins with a reminder of exactly what the United States’s role in all of this was, as it was the U.S.’s secret bombing of Cambodia (a neutral nation) during the Vietnam War that helped the Khmer Rouge find the support it needed to come into power. Once they did, the U.S. cleared out their embassy and got the hell out, leaving the Cambodian people and especially anyone connected to the previous government vulnerable to the Khmer Rouge’s violent retribution. According to an end title card, the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians (almost a quarter of the population) from 1975 to 1979, through execution, starvation, and forced labor.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of mystery behind Jolie’s directorial approach here. She set out to tell a true story with as much clarity, accuracy, and sensitivity as possible. She also set out to tell the story of a brutal totalitarian takeover through the eyes of a 5-year-old child, and indeed she succeeded on all counts. The child’s-eye-view of the Khmer Rouge takeover is a particularly rigorous and successful filmmaking effort. Loung is marched out of the capital along with her parents and siblings, and since the title isn’t exactly in the business of hiding pertinent plot details from you, you know that she’s going to be separated from her family sooner than later.

Ultimately, the film becomes a story not just of Loung — who ends up at several work camps before being trained as a child soldier, which included planting land mines — but of her siblings and their attempts to find their way back to each other. But this is decidedly Loung’s tale, from her perspective. The only true directorial flourishes in the film come in the form of color-saturated dreams and visions that Loung has, sometimes of the food they used to be able to eat, sometimes of the family she can’t find her way back to.

I feel confident in saying First They Killed My Father is Jolie’s best film as a director. Which might seem like damning with faint praise considering she’s never exactly been showed with praise in that field. But while I thought they ultimately fell short, I found a lot to like in movies like Unbroken and By the Sea. Still, First They Killed My Father is a completely realized vision, even in that vision is the exact kind of harrowing you were expecting. Points for following through exactly on the mission statement, I’d say, and points for, in the film’s closing moments, putting paid to that promise to make a plea for Americans to remember Cambodia, even if this country would rather forget.