The long way of hope (film)

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Movie
German title The long way of hope
Original title First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Country of production USA , Cambodia
original language English , Khmer
Publishing year 2017
length 136 minutes
Rod
Director Angelina Jolie
script Angelina Jolie,
Loung Ung
production Angelina Jolie,
Rithy Panh ,
Ted Sarandos ,
Michael Vieira
music Marco Beltrami
camera Anthony Dod Mantle
cut Xavier Box ,
Patricia Rommel
occupation

The long way of hope (original title First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers ) is a biography by Angelina Jolie , which premiered on February 18, 2017 in the Cambodian city of Siem Reap and in September 2017 as part of the Telluride film Festival was presented. The film is based on an autobiographical novel of the same name by Loung Ung from 2000.

2017 he was appointed as Cambodian contribution to the Academy Awards in 2018 as a foreign-language best picture selected, but ultimately not nominated.

action

The film tells the childhood story of Loung Ung , which she wrote down in her autobiographical novel The Far Way of Hope

The little Loung Ung lives in Cambodia. The year is 1975, and her father holds a high position in President Lon Nol's army. When he was deposed and the land was renamed “ Kampuchea ”, her father pretended to be a farmer and, like many other families, they had to leave the city. They are told they can return in three days, but they quickly understand that they may never see their home again.

All over the country there are violent acts and killings by the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, who have taken control of Cambodia and have already advanced to the capital Phnom Penh. A regime of horror that spans several years begins, people go hungry, and any rebellion is severely punished. The new Angkar communist leadership has indoctrinated the people into loving them more than their own relatives. Even if Lounge's parents do their best to keep them safe from all suffering, they cannot even protect their own lives. When the identity of their father is revealed and he is executed, the siblings are sent abroad by their mother for their safety. As a child soldier, Loung is forced to bury land mines, later she has to cross such a minefield as a refugee. She meets her siblings again in a refugee camp. In the final scene, the now adult siblings kneel in front of a temple.

Biographical background

The film is based on the autobiographical novel First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung in 2000, under the title The long journey of hope in the Fischer Verlag S. was published in a German translation. In her memoir, the now adult Cambodian contemporary witness describes how Khmer Rouge soldiers advanced into the capital Phnom Penh in April 1975 and how she became an orphaned refugee. Loung initially had to train as a child soldier in an orphan camp , while her brothers and sisters fought desperately for their lives in labor camps.

production

Production history

The film was produced by Netflix in collaboration with Bophana Production. The director was Angelina Jolie , who, together with Loung Ung, also adapted their memoirs for the film and also produced it together with Rithy Panh , Ted Sarandos and Michael Vieira . Ung, who is a friend of Jolie's, also acted as executive producer. Panh, a Cambodian filmmaker, like Ung, had survived the madness of the Pol Pot era. This is the fourth feature film that Jolie has directed. Her adoptive son Maddox worked on the script with his mother and is also an executive producer on the film.

In April 2012, Jolie was appointed UNHCR's special envoy . Before that, the actress had already visited over 40 crisis regions for over ten years as a special envoy for the UN Refugee Agency, including Cambodia several times. In 2002, she adopted a Cambodian boy from an orphanage in Phnom Penh and named him Maddox Chivan. She also founded the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation in 2006. Back in 2005, Jolie was granted Cambodian citizenship by Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni as a thank you for her work to preserve the environment in his country . As the country usually received little international attention because it was too insignificant, so Ali Al-Nasani from the Heinrich Böll Foundation , the news that Jolie would make a film about the genocide committed in her country 40 years ago, the Cambodian population in a state of excitement. The first reaction from the Cambodian audience was that people now felt urged to ask their parents about what they had been silent about for many years, which had been part of the survival tactic of many victims who could not be sure that the Khmer Rouge won't come back to power after all, so Al-Nasani.

Film music and filming

In the long journey of hope is the biggest film project ever undertaken in Cambodia. One of the locations is Siem Reap

The film music was composed by Marco Beltrami . He said about his work that it is not really connected with Cambodia, but rather with the six-year-old girl, through whose eyes you can see this, is rather abstract and above all should convey the emotional experience of this girl.

Anthony Dod Mantle acted as cameraman . The shooting took place between November 2015 and February 2016 in various cities in Cambodia , for example in Siem Reap at the end of 2015, a city whose name literally means "place of defeat of the Siamese" and which is based on a victory of the Khmer over the army of the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya in the 17th century. Further recordings were taken in early 2016 in Battambang, one of the original locations where uniformed Khmer soldiers came into the city with their trucks in 1975. No changes had to be made to the buildings themselves for the shooting, but signs above the shops were replaced with signs in French, so that the place looked like it had 40 years earlier.

Jolie had already been in front of the camera as Lara Croft in the film Tomb Raider , which was released in cinemas in 2001, in the largely mined country, back then as an actress, and was in personal contact with concrete humanitarian problems in Cambodia for the first time come, which was what made her keep coming back to the country. Jolie then contacted the UNHCR refugee agency for more information on international trouble spots.

It is in the long journey of hope to the biggest film project ever undertaken in Cambodia, and it came in the film predominantly Cambodian actors and extras, technicians and craftsmen used. The main role of the childlike Loung Ung was cast by the young Cambodian actress Sareum Srey Moch . Apart from a few words by President Richard Nixon in the inserted archive material, there is hardly any English to be heard in the film, only Khmer .

publication

The film premiered on February 18, 2017 in the historical sites of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap in the presence of the king, where parts of the film were also shot. The film premiered on September 2 at the Telluride Film Festival . It was also presented at the Toronto International Film Festival . The Long Way of Hope has been offered online by Netflix since September 15, 2017 .

reception

Reviews

So far, the film has won over 88 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics and received an average rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10 points.

Ali Al-Nasani from the Heinrich Böll Foundation explains that right at the beginning of the film, reference is made to the American area bombing in the course of the Vietnam War, which drove many of those affected into the hands of the Khmer Rouge . The film does not mention other reasons for the popularity of the Khmer Rouge and its success, but also the role of the then king, who allied himself with them and called for them to join them in the fight against the pro-American government in Phnom Penh. The film neither explains the ideology of the Khmer Rouge, which aimed to transform Cambodia into a purely peasant state with brutal violence and with the murder of around 2 million people , nor does it mention the widespread sexual violence and the practice of forced marriage , nor does it mention the leadership cadre would not be illuminated, some of which are on trial today, said Al-Nasani. The film also fails to mention China's support for the Khmer Rouge, which Cambodia saw as a counterweight to the communist regime in Vietnam, which was supported by the Soviet Union at the time: “Perhaps such a differentiation from the Cold War era is too much to ask for a Hollywood film . And so the film babbles along and alternates between the beauties of Cambodian country life (rice fields, palm trees) and depictions of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. "

One of the movie's strengths, according to The Independent's Geoffrey Macnab , is its factuality. Only very late does Jolie let him become melodramatic, as is to be expected in Hollywood films on such a topic. For the most part, however, the film shows the madness of the Pol Pot era from the perspective of an imaginative child trying to rationalize the apocalyptic world in which it finds itself.

After critics such as Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter had recommended a submission because of Jolie's dual citizenship and the fact that the film almost exclusively features Cambodian actors speaking in the official language, The Long Way of Hope in the September 2017 submitted by Cambodia as a nominee in the category Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards 2018 .

Awards

On December 18, 2017, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that Marco Beltrami's work was on a shortlist from which the nominations in the category Best Film Music will be made at the 2018 Academy Awards . Below is a selection of nominations and awards from other film awards.

Alliance of Women Film Journalists EDA Awards 2017

  • Nomination for Best Non-English Language Film
  • Nomination in the category Best Woman Director ( Angelina Jolie )
  • Nomination in the category Outstanding Achievement by A Woman in The Film Industry (Angelina Jolie)

British Academy Film Awards 2018

Critics' Choice Movie Awards 2018

Golden Globe Awards 2018

Hollywood Film Awards 2017

  • Honored with the Hollywood Foreign Language Film Award (Angelina Jolie and Loung Ung )

National Board of Review Awards 2017

  • Award in the Freedom of Expression category

Los Angeles Online Film Critics Society Awards 2018

  • Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards 2017

  • Award for best foreign language film

Satellite Awards 2017

Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Awards 2017

  • Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Geoffrey Macnab: First They Killed My Father, Toronto Film Festival review: Angelina Jolie's best work yet In: The Independent, September 14, 2017.
  2. ↑ The long way of hope In: fischerverlage.de, accessed on August 12, 2017.
  3. ↑ Julia Bork: 'First They Killed My Father': Angelina Jolie takes over the direction of the Netflix production about child soldiers in Cambodia In: filmstarts.de, July 24, 2015.
  4. ^ First They Killed My Father In: tiff.net. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  5. ↑ a b https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/movies/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-first-they-killed-my-father.html
  6. ↑ Angelina Jolie In: uno-fluechtlingshilfe.de. Retrieved August 12, 2017.
  7. ↑ Jolie-Pitt Foundation In: looktothestars.org. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  8. ^ Jolie given Cambodian citizenship In: bbc.co.uk, August 12, 2005.
  9. ^ A b c d e Ali Al-Nasani: Hollywood in Cambodia: First They Killed My Father In: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, February 24, 2017.
  10. ↑ http://filmmusicreporter.com/2016/08/23/marco-beltrami-to-score-angelina-jolies-first-they-killed-my-father-a-daughter-of-cambodia-remembers/
  11. ↑ http://cutprintfilm.com/features/interviews/composer-marco-beltrami-logan/
  12. ↑ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3342653/PICTURED-Director-Angelina-Jolie-Pitt-mingles-cast-crew-set-new-Khmer-Rouge-film-Killed-Father-Cambodia .html
  13. ↑ http://www.timpaton.info/news/angelina-jolie-in-battambang
  14. ↑ a b After the successful wrap of the production of First They Killed My Father in mid February, 2016, the movie is set to be premiered on the 18th of February 2017 in Siem Reap, Cambodia In: cambodia-cfc.org. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  15. ↑ http://filmdaily.co/blog/trailers/first-they-killed-my-father-trailer/
  16. ↑ Kristopher Tapley, Paula Parisi: Angelina Jolie Gets Standing Ovation for 'Cambodia' Film at Telluride . In: Variety, September 2, 2017.
  17. ↑ Toronto International Film Festival 2017. Official Film Schedule In: tiff.net. Retrieved on August 23, 2017 (PDF; 852 KB)
  18. ↑ http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-09-15/first-they-killed-my-father-netflix-history/
  19. ^ First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers In: Rotten Tomatoe. Retrieved July 6, 2018.
  20. ↑ Scott Feinberg: Telluride: Angelina Jolie's 'First They Killed My Father' Takes Fest by Storm In: The Hollywood Reporter, September 2, 2017.
  21. ↑ Patrick Frater: Cambodia Picks Angelina Jolie's 'First They Killed My Father' as Oscar Contender In: Variety, September 18, 2017.
  22. ↑ Zack Sharf: Oscars 2018: Best Original Score Shortlist Includes 'The Shape of Water', 'All the Money in the World' and More In: indiewire.com, December 18, 2017.
  23. ↑ 2017 AWFJ EDA Award Nominees In: awfj.org. Retrieved January 9, 2018.
  24. ↑ Kristopher Tapley, 'Shape of Water' Leads Critics' Choice Film Nominations In: Variety, December 6, 2017.
  25. ↑ Angelina Jolie & Loung Ung to Receive Award at Hollywood Film Awards for 'First They Killed My Father' In: justjared.com, November 2, 2017.
  26. ↑ Anthony D'Alessandro: National Board Of Review Winners: 'The Post' Comes Up Strong With Best Pic, Best Actress Meryl Streep, Best Actor Tom Hanks In: deadline.com, November 28, 2017.
  27. ↑ Chris Evangelista: 2017 Los Angeles Online Film Critics Society Nominations Announced In: slashfilm.com, December 4, 2017.
  28. ↑ 2017 Awards Winners ( Memento of the original from January 4, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.phoenixfilmcriticssociety.org archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: phoenixfilmcriticssociety.org. Retrieved January 7, 2018.
  29. ↑ Steve Pond: 'Dunkirk', 'The Shape of Water' Lead Satellite Award Nominations In: thewrap.com, November 29, 2017.
  30. ↑ The 2017 WAFCA Awards In: wafca.com, December 8, 2017.