Privilege In First They Killed My Father

Privilege is a beast of many disguises. Those in a privileged position can often be, intentionally or other otherwise, fooled by it, lulled into complacency under the lie that everything is alright, and they have done nothing wrong. It is easier to see oppression, but much harder to see that which is right in front of you in your own life. Recognizing privilege in daily life is vitally important, and one of the best ways to recognize the beast is to study up, to watch privilege in action at the very highest rungs of society, or in our case, in the life of Angelina Jolie.
When viewed through the lens of intersectionality, it becomes clear how much Jolie’s privileges benefit her. As intersectionality applies to oppression, the more levels of

With this amount of privilege and financial resources on hand, regardless of the purity of intentions, it is easy for people to fall in the “white savior” trope. In some ways, she does well: she uses her privilege and platform to highlight “obscure” areas of history that generally overlooked, and she does this in her film “First They Killed My Father” in a good way. She based the plot on the true story of her friend’s life, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, and worked closely with the Cambodian film director Rithy Panh. Jolie also sought to make the film as authentic as possible, enlisting “thousands of Cambodians” to play the roles of extras, and was careful to be sensitive to the culture of the country, “arrang[ing] for monks to pray and set out incense and offerings beforehand” (Buckley

In the very movie that couple fell in love, Brad Pitt made twice the amount of money ($20 million v. $10 million) as Jolie, even though they were co-stars with similar amounts of screen time (“Angelina Jolie Net Worth” 2017). As female film director, Jolie is also under higher pressure for her films to succeed. She is a woman in a male dominated field, and as actress Cate Blanchett remarks in an interview on sexism in Hollywood, women are not allowed to “screw up” in the film making industry (Bloom 2015). There are high amounts of “second-time male directors,” Blanchett comments: “If for some reason their film doesn’t do well, in eight to 12 months they’re back in there again, someone backs them,” whereas when a woman messes up, she is written off as just being a poor director (Bloom