Overview
A 5-year-old girl embarks on a harrowing quest for survival amid the sudden rise and terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Reviews
Probably not since the "Killing Fields" (1984) has Hollywood attempted to go back into the realms of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and it's genocide. This time, Angelina Jolie has based a film on the real life childhood experiences of Loung Ung (Sareum Srey Moch). This was a lass of modest family stock who found her life destroyed when Cambodia was invaded, her father killed and she, her mother and sister left to fend for themselves amidst a crumbling society being governed increasingly lawlessly whilst being bombed relentlessly from above as overspill from the adjacent war in Vietnam. By taking a child's eye view, somehow this film manages to augment what we know about this brutality into an whole new sphere of fear and apprehension, and the young Sareum Srey Moch holds this together with remarkably convincing aplomb. What also helps here is that there is very little English spoken, so we are not being distracted by familiar faces or half-baked accents. Instead we focus more on the unforgiving conditions through which she had to trek and then of the equally rigorous discipline imposed on her and her fellow children by the heavily doctrine-driven soldiers who thought nothing of arming and training a child to use a Kalashnikov; lob a grenade nor of indoctrinating them with a message designed to brainwash. It makes little effort to try to sanitise her journey through the blood-soaked jungle nor spare us some of the more gruesome consequences that took the innocence from Loung Ung but not, it emerges, her humanity. It's not especially graphic, but poignantly leaves our own imagination to do much of the heavy lifting and though never an easy film or watch, is compelling.
