Author and activist Loung Ung survived the Cambodian Genocide as a child. Now her internationally recognized memoir ‘First They Killed My Father’ is going to be adapted for film by Netflix and Angelina Jolie. Oscar-winning actress Jolie Pitt, who directed 2014’s Unbroken, read Ung’s book, which was published in 2000, and the two became close friends.
“I was deeply affected by Loung’s book,” Jolie Pitt says in a statement accompanying the Netflix announcement. “It deepened forever my understanding of how children experience war and are affected by the emotional memory of it. And it helped me draw closer still to the people of Cambodia, my son’s homeland.”