Angelina Jolie is teaming up with Netflix for her next stint as a director, which will be a dramatic adaptation of a real-life story about Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, according to Variety.

Jolie, an outspoken advocate of global human rights issues and a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency, will be adapting ‘First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers’, a 2000 memoir by Loung Ung, a Cambodian writer, human rights activist and survivor of the 'killing fields' whom Jolie has known for more than a decade.

Angelina JolieAngelina Jolie will be working on a project with Netflix about the Cambodian killing fields

“I was deeply affected by Loung’s book,” said Jolie. “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. It is a dream come true to be able to adapt this book for the screen.”

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This will be her fourth directing project overall, and she’ll be teaming up with Oscar-nominated Cambodian film-maker Rithy Panh (for 2014’s The Missing Picture) who will take up a producer’s role.

Jolie also praised Netflix for agreeing to collaborate on the project. “Films like this are hard to watch but important to see,” she said. “They are also hard to get made. Netflix is making this possible, and I am looking forward to working with them and excited that the film will reach so many people.”

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content acquisition, also said the company was “proud” to be working with Jolie on an “emotionally powerful and ultimately uplifting story”, adding “Loung Ung’s incredible journey is a testament to the human spirit and its ability to transcend even the toughest circumstances.”

Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia in 1975, and slaughtered two million people (one quarter of the country’s population at the time) in less than four years before being overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion force in January 1979.

First They Killed My Father… will make its debut at international film festivals before hitting Netflix in late 2016, it is anticipated.

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