A preface to a national tragedy narrated through the eyes and mind of a child.
Knitted in the memoirs of Ung’s experiences along with her family during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
The piece of art is painfully loyal to the excruciating experiences that pursued post the Khmer Rouge took over, an unmistakable denial of the then-President Richard Nixon insisting that there was no American war and the animosity of the then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger towards the people of Cambodia and the vaguely promise of a “Final Solution”.
The power vacuum that followed at the behest of American carpet bombing of Cambodia at the closure to the war which had opened the Pandora Box!
The Khmer Rouge, armed-wing of the Vietnam People’s Army of North Vietnam led by Dictator Pol Pot, rushes to fill in for the country’s already decrepit government, crushing it further by taking absolute control thus paving way to absolute atrocity and human-wipe out.
Luong’s story opens with affluence. Her father was a military police officer in the capital. Amidst the discussions on the socio-political changes the U.S war was ought to bring, Luong leans on the trench of their bungalow to witness troops of Khmer Rouge entering the capital thus marking the beginning of the Communists Movement in the country.
“First They Killed My Father” accounts an ardent struggle for survival of Luong’s helpless family looming in the darkness of uncertainty of life with certain death.
One of the opening scenes, where Luong’s mother, father and siblings are seen detaching themselves from the things they loved, dresses for an impending birthday, foreign made toys, imported footwear- symbolism of absolute antithetical to the utopian ideals of Communism.
That was although just the prep for the audience to get prepared for forthcoming moments of horror that included starvation, inhumane punishment, disease and death.
“First They Killed My Father” however ignores the elements of Cambodian-Vietnamese acrimony, presenting constant vituperation rather of anti-Vietnamese war time conditioning.
One striking feature about the movie is that it is able to retain the innocence of the five year old Loung Ung. Dying or Dead, Loung’s character perceived everything as the eyes of a five year old, her emotional vent was like sunshine, she was comfortably numb.
She adapted herself when the vegetables and rice being taken from the camp workers and sent to the front lines to feed combat soldiers, when they were starved with just spoonful of broth, with continued sadism and humiliation in the hands of the cadets.
Luong’s joy when father roasted plump beetles for the family midnight.
“First They Killed My Father” was progressing innately as an ode of a five year old and how her world that changed almost everyday! Jolie’s genius comes across so vibrantly in the detachment Loung’s character had moments of fear, lament or mirth smiling back at someone who could have been the murderer of his father, mother, or his siblings yet, in the artillery shells tearing through tree lines at night, the mines tearing bodies in the air, limbless, all but, is shown through the eyes of Loung, a child!
