Screening followed by a Virtual Q&A with Director Joshua Oppenheimer
(2012) Denmark. 159min.
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer; Co-directors Christine Cynn, Anonymous
BAFTA award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary that has shocked audiences through both its content and form. A terrifying insight into the actions of military mass murder in 1960s Indonesia as re-enacted by the perpetrators themselves. 'The Act of Killing' shines a light on a past we would all prefer to ignore while telling us as much about the world we live in today as any film in recent memory.
When the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo and his followers joined in the mass murder of alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals. Anwar and his cohorts take pride in their past and re-enact their crimes using elaborate sets, costumes and extras enlisted to play victims.
This ultimately terrifying and consistently disturbing documentary opens with a quote from Voltaire - "All murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers, and to the sound of trumpets", which gives way to the sight of scanitly clad female dancers emerging from a giant fish, a black-clad priest and man in garish electric-blue drag pulling shapes at the foot of a waterfall. The look in their eyes somewhat unhinged and deranged, gleeful smiles dorn their lips.
Much later the film ends with the sound of someone retching, the realisation of the evil in which he partook causing him to howl and hurl as if trying to expunge the very past from his soul. In between, we find ourselves looking long into an abyss in which unspeakable horror and utterly mundane madness are thrown together in a world where fact and fiction collide head on with disorientatingly surreal results. This film is a fevered dream documenting that famous Nietzche quote about how when “you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you”.
Oppenheimer's film, a recent BAFTA Award-winner in the Best Documentary category and nominated for an Oscar, is an ‘Apocalypse Now’ for the post everything generation.
This is a demented journey to the dark heart of man, an examination of guilt and a meditation on the past and how history is written by the winners, rather than the just.
What the Critics Are Saying:
'One of the Most Lucid Portraits of Evil I’ve Ever Seen'
-David Edelstein, Vulture
'The perpetrators of purges in 1960s Indonesia eagerly re‑enact their atrocities for this extraordinary film'
-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
'This masterpiece about propaganda, cinema and vanity as instruments of power and terror ends on an excruciatingly sustained, righteous money shot: a monster who could have been a good man suffocates on the truth.'
-Steven Boone, RogerEbert.com