Angelina Jolie has been filmed eating spiders and scorpions with her children in Cambodia where she also spoke publicly for the first time about her split with Brad Pitt.

"You start with crickets and a beer, and you then you kind of move up to tarantulas," the actress told BBC journalist Yalda Hakim in a recent filmed interview.

In the video posted on the BBC News Twitter account, Jolie, 41, was seen teaching the group how to defang spiders and then fry them with scorpions and other bugs.

"I first had them when I was first in the country," said Jolie, who filmed Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001 in Cambodia.

She was seen eating the bugs and declaring, "It's actually really good, the flavour," adding "It's hard to chew the scorpion."

Her son Knox, eight, said they tasted like "dry chips, flavourless chips".

Her arrival in Cambodia marked a rare public appearance since her high-profile split last year from actor Pitt, 53.

She was in Siem Reap province on Saturday to screen First They Killed My Father, a new film directed by her and based on a memoir by a survivor of the deadly Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s.

The premiere at the Angkor Wat temple complex will be followed by screenings across the country, some seven months before the film is released to a global audience on Netflix.

Jolie also commented on her divorce from Pitt in the interview.

"I don't really want to say much about that, except to say that it was a very difficult time. We are a family, and we will always be a family. And we will get through this time and we will be a stronger family," she said, her voice thick with emotion.

Asked about how she was coping, she said: "Many, many people find themselves in this situation. My whole family - we've all been through a difficult time.

"My focus is my children, our children. And my focus is finding this way through.

"As I said, we are and forever will be a family. That is how I'm coping, I'm coping with finding a way through to make sure that this somehow makes us stronger and closer."

She and Pitt brought up Hollywood's most celebrated family with three of their six children adopted from overseas.

One of them is son Maddox, 15, who was adopted from Cambodia and who accompanied her on the trip.

She filed for divorce last September and currently has physical custody of their children.