Angelina Jolie's new movie 'First They Killed My Father' has been listed as Cambodia's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars.
Angelina Jolie
The film was shot by Jolie in the Southeast Asian country and features an all-Cambodian cast with virtually no English dialogue, and it has been submitted by the Cambodia Oscar Selection Committee as the nation's entry.
Based on the memoir by Loung Ung, it focuses on what life was like for Ung and the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, a period which saw nearly two million people killed.
'First They Killed My Father' was first shown at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals before being released on Netflix.
Being submitted into this category marks the highest entry to date of foreign language movies but might not be accepted by the Academy.
Jolie was heavily criticised after a recent Vanity Fair profile described how casting directors looked to Cambodian orphanages, circuses and slum schools to find a child actor to play their lead, Ung, and set up a game "disturbing in its realism" where money was put on a table and they were encouraged to think of what they needed it for before the cash was snatched away.
However, the 42-year-old actress explained to the magazine: "Srey Moch [the girl ultimately chosen for the part] was the only child that stared at the money for a very, very long time. When she was forced to give it back, she became overwhelmed with emotion. All these different things came flooding back. When she was asked later what the money was for, she said her grandfather had died, and they didn't have enough money for a nice funeral."
While shooting the film, Jolie revealed she had therapists on site to help the actors who had to wear the uniforms of the Khmer Rouge soldiers.
She told the Sunday Times Culture magazine: "Everything we learnt to make the film was something we were learning about the country itself -- where the scars had settled, why we would need therapists on set -- because so many people had never talked about their experiences before."
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