Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
In the wake of Indonesias 1965 military coup, death squads executed a million citizens accused of being communists. Joshua Oppenheimers astonishing, incendiary documentary not only gives the cold-blooded killers enough rope to hang themselves with, it also convinces them to turn their lynching into a surreal pageant.
In a bold example of utterly fearless filmmaking, Oppenheimer travels to Indonesia and offers the former mercenaries who proudly identify themselves as gangsters the opportunity to shoot a movie that details their bloody exploits. Welcoming this chance to celebrate their gory glory days, they alternate between staging bizarre reenactments that run the gamut from hard-boiled pastiche to outlandish musical numbers and proudly recounting their barbaric torture techniques.
What strikes you most during these interviews is their casualness as they recall heinous acts with a warm nostalgia. Few films can rival The Act of Killing for its pervasive sense of wrongness. Watching events unfold, you feel as though youve been plunged into a surreal parallel universe in which reality has been warped and distorted: where talk show audiences consist solely of uniformed paramilitary forces and human rights are something to be mocked.
However, in the case of Anwar Congo who claims to have killed a thousand men with his bare hands the reenactments from the film-within-a-film slowly lead to reevaluation and, ultimately, reckoning. In turn, we watch something remarkable occur as art suddenly becomes an instrument of interrogation. In the final scenes, Oppenheimers camera holds on Anwar, mercilessly refusing to relent until its broken him. Its a devastating climax to one of the years most powerful films.
(Opens July 19 at Vancity.)
