Page 30 - ARUBA TODAY

A30 PEOPLE & ARTS
Monday 31 July 2017
Angelina Jolie says child casting story is false, upsetting

By LINDSEY BAHR the methods as being cruel
AP Film Writer and exploitative.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — An- Adapted from Loung Ung’s
gelina Jolie says accounts memoir, the biographi-
of her casting process for cal drama centers on her
children to appear in her childhood under the bru-
film “First They Killed My tal Khmer Rouge regime in
Father” are false and up- Cambodia. Jolie co-wrote
setting. An excerpt from and directed the film,
a Vanity Fair profile of the which she talked about in
director sparked backlash a recent Vanity Fair profile.
online earlier this week The article described a
from people who criticized scene in which casting di-

In a Feb. 18, 2017 file photo, actress Angelina Jolie gives a press conference in Siem Reap prov-
ince, Cambodia.
Associated Press

rectors in their attempt to pened.” acting, and make believe.”
find a child actress to play Jolie said parents, guard- The Vanity Fair article went
the lead role presented ians and doctors were on into more detail about the
money to impoverished set daily to care for the production than the one
children only to take it children and “make sure paragraph that circulated
away from them as an act- that no one was in any way on Twitter, which sparked
ing exercise. hurt by participating in the the initial outrage.
Jolie and producer Rithy recreation of such a painful A representative from Van-
Panh issued joint state- part of their country’s his- ity Fair issued a statement
ments Sunday responding tory.” Sunday saying that author
to the outrage and refuting Panh, who himself is a sur- Evgenia Peretz “clearly
claims that the production vivor of the Khmer Rouge, describes what happened
was exploitative through a added that casting “was during the casting process
representative from Netflix, done in the most sensitive as a ‘game’ “ and “that
which is producing and dis- way possible.” the filmmakers went to ex-
tributing the film. He described a process traordinary lengths to be
“I am upset that a pretend that was informed both by sensitive in addressing the
exercise in an improvisa- families’ preferences and psychological stresses on
tion, from an actual scene NGO (non-governmental the cast and crew that
in the film, has been written organization) guidelines in were inevitable in making a
about as if it was a real sce- which the children under- movie about the genocide
nario. stood that they would be carried out in Cambodia
The suggestion that real acting out a scene. by the Khmer Rouge.”
money was taken from a “The children were not Jolie’s film will debut on
child during an audition is tricked or entrapped, as Netflix sometime after
false and upsetting,” Jolie some have suggested,” showing at the Toronto In-
said. “I would be outraged Panh said. “They under- ternational Film Festival this
myself if this had hap- stood very well that this was September.q

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