THE Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, is an annual awards show celebrating achievements in cinema across a number of categories from the past year.

First They Killed My Father is among the 92 films on the Academy’s initial long list, which will be shot down to a handful before the final nominees are decided in January 2018.

And there is a good chance that Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut film will bag the award.

Jolie, an accomplished actress, was given an honorary citizenship of Cambodia in 2005, a country where she has done extensive charity work and from where she also adopted a child.

Jolie’s film is about the brutal Khmer Rouge regime — a theme which hasn’t been captured cinematically in such detail before — even though there have been precedents such as Roland Joffé’s Oscar-winning 1984 epic The Killing Fields.

First They Killed My Father is an adaptation of Loung Ung’s harrowing story of her family’s experience under the Khmer Rouge. Jolie, who co-wrote the film with Ung, does not try to over-explain every political detail of the civil war.

Shot entirely in the Kingdom and in Khmer, employing hundreds of locals, the story unfolds through a child’s-eye. Ung is one of the seven children living in relative comfort in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge rebels sweep into the capital.

If the movie picks the coveted award, as many predict it will, it would not go to Jolie but to the country as a whole, under Academy rules.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2017