Netflix has added Angelia Jolie (Pitt) to their growing collection of big-name collaborators (which also, expensively, includes her husband, Brad something). Jolie will be directing the film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, based on the 2000 memoir by Loung Ung about the division of her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. During this time, Ung was forced to become a child soldier, and her siblings were sent to labor camps. After the eventual collapse of Khmer Rouge, she and her siblings gradually reunited.
Jolie co-adapted the script with the author (whom, according to Variety, she’d contacted and befriended a decade ago), and will also serve as a producer (alongside Rithy Panh, director of The Missing Picture) of the film, which will debut on Netflix sometime in 2016. Her Cambodian-born son Maddox is said to be involved, in a yet unknown capacity. Production will likely soon begin, once Jolie completes post-production on By the Sea (about a couple confronting “unresolved issues” at a seaside town in France in the 70s) which she starred in, wrote and directed.
Jolie and Ung expressed their mutual admiration for one another’s work and compassion in a statement, with Jolie saying:
I was deeply affected by Loung’s book…It deepened forever my understanding of how children experience war and are affected by the emotional memory of it. And it helped me draw closer still to the people of Cambodia, my son’s homeland.
Ung said:
Angelina and I met in 2001 in Cambodia, and immediately, I trusted Angelina’s heart… Through the years, we have become close friends, and my admiration for Angelina as a woman, a mother, a filmmaker and a humanitarian has only grown. It is with great honor that I entrust my family’s story to Angelina to adapt into a film.