Review: First They Killed My Father

Confidence and a keen connection to her subject matter have been Angelina Jolie's greatest strengths as a director and her fourth feature, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, is a particularly personal passion project for the Oscar-winning humanitarian. Her adopted son Maddox, who serves as executive producer on the film, was born in Cambodia and it was during their many visits to his homeland that Jolie developed a friendship with Loung Ung, on whose memoir of the same name the film is based.

Let's take a moment to admire Jolie's choices as a filmmaker. She has tackled difficult subject matter from the start, conveying intimate personal stories set against relatively epic and mostly political backdrops, and often eschewing the involvement of huge stars in favour of relative unknowns. (Though she and then-husband Brad Pitt headlined her last effort, By the Sea, it was a decidedly European art cinema zag instead of the Mr. and Mrs. Smith redux zig that most audiences expected.) Whatever their failings, it is abundantly clear that Jolie has a point of view and she knows how to execute it with a strong sense of purpose, a cinematic eye for composition and detail, and a necessary lack of compromise when it comes to having the film serve the character rather than the other way around.

All of those qualities are very much in evident in First They Killed My Father, a film in which barely a Caucasian figure is seen, the dialogue is in the Khmer language, and nearly every scene tethered to the point-of-view of five-year-old Loung (Sareum Srey Moch). The prologue's archival footage fills viewers in on the political climate: then-President Richard Nixon denying America's secret carpet bombing of Cambodia before withdrawing troops ("We are helping Cambodians to help themselves."), leaving the Cambodians vulnerable to the atrocities they will soon experience under the brutal Khmer Rouge. The montage ends with Loung's reflection in a television screen, the image foreshadowing how she will soon be swept up in the turmoil. Indeed, several scenes later, Loung and her family are out in the streets, just one family amongst the hundreds who have been ordered by the Khmer Rouge to evacuate into the countryside.

From thereon in, the film resembles a survival story as Loung and her family are stripped of their possessions (the soldiers carp on about renouncing all personal property and divesting themselves of corrupt Western influences) and their sense of security as even the most innocuous encounters could reveal that Loung's father was a military officer for the former government. Of course, his fate is already revealed in the title and it should come as no surprise that he is not the first family member that Loung will lose or be separated from. Loung herself, during the two-year time span the film covers, will be in a children's camp where she's taught to plant land mines, shoot AK-47s, and stand waist-deep in water as rain pours down on her and the other children with only hunger and fear as her faithful companions.

The film is impressionistic and observational, with images expressing more than words could say - the barely there gruel that the Cambodians are given contrasted with the baskets brimming with rice and vegetables sent to the soldiers, the monks forced to work the fields as the soldiers hurl insults at them, Loung and other children scrambling for cover as they're caught amidst the gunfire between Vietnamese soldiers and the Khmer Rouge flunkies, and, perhaps most powerfully and disturbingly, Loung standing in the middle of a minefield as those around her are blasted into pieces. Some may criticise Jolie for not providing a greater context to Loung's story or for showing the mass exterminations that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, but First They Killed My Father is no less impactful for these omissions. This is very much a story seen through a child's eyes and, though she cannot fully process or articulate the events, she - and, by extension, the audience - bears witness to a country's tragedy.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

Directed by: Angelina Jolie

Written by: Angelina Jolie and Loung Ung; based on the memoir by Loung Ung

Starring: Sareum Srey Moch, Phoeung Kompheak, Sveng Socheata