The moment sends a chill down the spine of many Cambodians.Early on the morning of April 17, 1975, battle-hardened young fighters of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla army began silently filtering into the capital Phnom Penh, which had been besieged for five months.Many city dwellers cheered, hoping it would be the end of a civil war that had cost half a million lives.But it was to be the beginning of a four-year nightmare that left an estimated 1.7 million people dead from starvation, disease or execution as the Khmer Rouge emptied cities and tore up money in a disastrous attempt to create an agrarian utopia.Now almost 41 years later, photos have emerged on the internet of a dramatic recreation of that day – stirring memories of the genocide – despite that the producers of the Angelina Jolie-directed movie First They Killed My Father kept paparazzi away from the set."Seeing these scenes, remembering the true story during that regime … the pain and will never be forgotten," posted one Facebook user."It still haunts my memory, non-stop," posted another.Beyond blockades manned by today's soldiers, the photographs taken by onlookers show black-clad and heavily armed actors arriving on trucks in Battambang, the country's second-largest north-western city.The streets were lined with 1960s vintage cars, a computer shop had been transformed into a camera repair shop and a brick building had become a cinema.Hundreds of extras hired to appear in the movie were paid $US25 a day in the impoverished country were the average income is $US940 a year.The movie, produced for Netflix and shot in the Cambodian language and English, is an adaptation of a non-fiction book by Loung Ung, a childhood survivor of the Khmer Rouge era who was trained as a soldier in a camp for orphans.Angelina Jolie is greeted by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Jolie says she was deeply affected by Loung's book and the movie will be "hard to watch but important to see".She told Associated Press the intent of the movie is not to revisit the horrors of war but to bring to the screen characters that people worldwide will empathise with, and to help other people learn about Cambodia."What is special about this particular story is that it is told from the perspective of a five-year-old child, and is based on a child's emotional experience of war," she said."It sheds light not only on the experience of children during the genocide in Cambodia but of all children who endure war."Jolie said the movie will also draw her closer to the people of Cambodia, the homeland of her adopted 14-year-old son Maddox, who is involved in the production.Despite being deprived access to the set, the paparazzi have been busy revealing the 40-year-old Oscar-winning Jolie's new tattoos, supposedly inked by Thai master tattooist Ajarn Noo.And the gossip writers have claimed divorce was nearing with 52-year-old Brad Pitt (subsequently denied), and she was adopting another Cambodian child to join her six other children (also denied).Jolie, a United Nations special envoy on refugees, has had a decade-long association with Cambodia, whose 15 million people remain deeply scarred by the Khmer Rouge period.In 2001 she starred in Lara Croft:Tomb Raider, a movie shot at a temple in the Angkor Wat complex in the country's north-west.In 2003 she founded the Maddox Jolie Pitt Foundation, a non-government-organisation that focuses on environmental conservation, rural poverty and female empowerment.The foundation bought 60,000 hectares of Cambodian land that was infiltrated by poachers, and turned it into a wildlife reserve.Cambodia's King Norodom Sihamoni has signed a special decree giving Jolie Cambodian citizenship, in recognition of her environmental work in the country.
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