The 51-year-old actress and humanitarian took to Instagram on Friday, July 24, to mark a somber milestone: a year since fighting broke out on the Cambodia-Thailand border, displacing tens of thousands and disrupting communities Angelina Jolie considers family. Her post reflected both the ongoing crisis and her decades-long ties to the Southeast Asian nation her eldest son calls his birthplace.
Jolie described how the border violence shattered the “safety and stability” of people in a region central to her family’s life. A year later, the humanitarian emergency persists: close to 30,000 individuals remain forced from their homes with no clear path to return, she wrote.
Two Decades of Work in Samlout
Through the Maddox Foundation, named for her son Maddox, now 24, whom she adopted from a Battambang orphanage in 2002, Jolie has anchored a locally led initiative in rural Samlout focused on landmine clearance, forest conservation, education infrastructure, healthcare delivery, and sustainable agriculture. The foundation’s headquarters lie close to where last year’s clashes erupted, she noted, adding that more than 20 years of hands-on collaboration with neighbors and staff have forged bonds she describes as deeply personal.
Last year’s violence forced the foundation to pull its team out of the area, Jolie disclosed. Staff have since returned to resume conservation and community support activities. Yet her message conveyed continued worry for displaced residents still awaiting safe passage home, closing with words in Cambodian about coming back.
Plans to Relocate After Twins Turn 18
The Instagram reflection coincides with a major transition. Jolie said in 2024 that she was living in Los Angeles solely because of divorce stipulations, and that she planned to relocate to Cambodia after the twins, Knox and Vivienne, her youngest children, turned 18—a threshold they crossed earlier this month. She outlined an intention to divide her time between the country and visits to relatives scattered globally.
Maddox, Vivienne, Shiloh, 20, and Zahara, 21—four of her six children—have opted to remove Pitt’s surname from their names while retaining Jolie, she said. Cambodia, she emphasized in her post, is both her son’s homeland and the place her family now considers home.
From Filmmaking to Refugee Advocacy
Jolie’s relationship with Cambodia has also informed her creative output. She presented “First They Killed My Father,” a film adaptation of Cambodian refugee Loung Ung’s memoir, at the Telluride Film Festival on September 3, 2017, ahead of its September 15, 2017, release in select theaters and on Netflix. Ung, who fled Phnom Penh as a child and arrived in America in 1980 after six months in a Thai refugee camp, shared the stage with Jolie. She recounted her resettlement in Burlington, Vt., then Cleveland, and her first return visit in 1995, two years after the United States and Cambodia reestablished diplomatic ties. Since then, she has traveled back more than 35 times.
Years earlier, Jolie’s humanitarian focus brought her to Thailand’s northern border. In her role as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, she traveled to the Ban Mai Nai Soi camp in early 2009, where she met refugees who had endured decades in closed facilities after fleeing Myanmar. On February 5, 2009, she called on Thai authorities to allow greater freedom of movement for the many thousands trapped without permission to work, leave, or pursue higher education.
At the time, Ban Mai Nai Soi housed 18,111 primarily Karenni refugees, part of roughly 111,000 registered refugees distributed across nine camps strung along the Thailand-Myanmar border. About 5,000 people who escaped to Mae Hong Son province between 2006 and 2007—during the last major burst of combat in Kayah State—still awaited official registration. Arrivals continued through the prior year, driven largely by forced labor and rights violations. Jolie also highlighted the situation of Rohingya refugees who arrived by boat—78 individuals whom the refugee agency had recently gained access to in detention—urging that Thailand extend comparable generosity to them.
Nearly 20 years on, her latest message carries the same thread of concern. With foundation staff back in Samlout, Jolie made plain that the displacement crisis gripping the Cambodia-Thailand border remains unresolved for tens of thousands still unable to return.
