The Act of Killing
Boldly staged and formally daring, Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated documentary shines a light on one of the semi-forgotten atrocities of the Cold War: the state-sponsored mass execution of Indonesian communists and other dissidents following the failed coup of September 1965. With jaw-dropping audacity, Oppenheimer and his codirectors persuade their key interviewees, unpunished and mostly unapologetic killers, to reenact their crimes on camera in the style of gangster and Western movies. Boasting Werner Herzog and Errol Morris as executive producers, the film won international laurels and spawned a 2014 sequel, THE LOOK OF SILENCE.
Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, Syamsul Arifin
- Notes From Chai VasarhelyiI first saw this at South by Southwest, and I was immediately impressed by how it subverted the documentary genre. Documentary at its core is about bearing witness. Josh ascribes a great humanity to his participants, but they still have to face the horrors of what they did. There’s one particularly powerful scene that has stayed in my mind. One of the main characters is unable to really say what he did, but he retches as he talks, as if he’s trying to expel the truth from his body but at the same time knows he can’t. I’m always astonished by the trust Josh is able to gain with his subjects.
- Notes From Pablo LarraínImpunity has been a subject of my own work in a number of movies, but usually the one who commits the crime denies it or tries to avoid the subject. And in this film, those who were responsible for the genocide are right there, looking at the camera, proud of what they did. So it’s on another scale. And I think Joshua did something very interesting, taking it to a place where it becomes almost a farce on some level. There’s absurdity in this historical narrative. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen a movie where mass killing is so somehow accepted, and that creates a very specific type of horror that’s very scary and creates discomfort and distress in the audience—in my case, in myself. So I thought it was a very interesting achievement and a very complicated and difficult movie to digest. Because of that, it becomes a cinematic political weapon. There are very few examples where cinema can actually say something so clear about a political process. This movie has that.
