Inspired doco about 60s death squads who executed over a million Indonesian communists, made in collaboration with the executioners. “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade.” — Werner Herzog
It is essential viewing for us all.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2013
The Act of Killing 2012
In this inspired and audacious documentary, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invites veterans of the 60s death squads, who carried out reprisals against Indonesia’s communists, to re-enact their vilest actions for his camera. Still riding high on gangster celebrity and status, the old thugs comply readily, devising exultant action movie scenarios to represent their brutal supremacy over the wily communist scum. The spectacle is both grotesque and clarifying: a Hollywood template accommodates the banality of evil.
Completed with the patronage of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, veteran interrogators of the darkest hearts, The Act of Killing drives us into the thick of the violent trauma that continues to shadow life in the world’s fourth most populous land.
“The Act of Killing is eye-opening both as a radical development in the documentary form and as an explosive journalistic exposé. It’s also a deeply disturbing emotional experience, a movie that some audiences will find upsetting or hard to stomach, even if it is also poetic, funny, profoundly strange
and moving… [Oppenheimer’s strategy is] a masterstroke, a ploy that turns his subjects into active collaborators and the apparatus of moviemaking into the ultimate wire tap.” — Tom Charity, CNN.com
“If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognise the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing. It is essential viewing for us all.” — National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia