Starring: Anwar Congo, Herman Kotto, Joshua Oppenheimer
In 1965, Indonesia experienced a change in governance
when the right-wing military took control. Wrapped up in a mission to rid the
country from Communist influence, the new military arrested, tortured and
killed scores of communists, intellectuals, citizens of Chinese extraction and
many others over the course of many years. Documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer
travels to Indonesia to meet some of the men responsible for the tortures and
executions and asks them to recreate their actions in a fictional film.
The actions taken by the military government in Indonesia
are amongst some of the most brutal in modern history, but have largely escaped
wide-spread knowledge in the west; an issue that The Act Of Killing attempts to
address. The film was produced by acclaimed German film-maker and documentarian
Werner Herzog (alongside Herzog's American associate Errol Morris) and
similarly combines the inherent realism of the documentary form with a weird
aura of surreality. There are many moments in The Act Of Killing that you
probably won't believe and many more you simply don't want to believe.
Throughout the interview subjects talk in a horrifyingly nonchalant manner
about various atrocities (one man killing several Chinese-Indonesians in a
rampage, including his girlfriend's father, a military officer reminiscing on
when he used to raid villages and rape fourteen-year-old girls, a TV talk show
with a live audience entirely composed of camouflage-clad right-wing
militants).
Amidst this, there's a pitch-black sense of humour
surrounding the absolutely overwhelming sense of violence (one government
minister states that he wants to wipe out any Communist sympathisers in his
country...but in a humane way) but the most significant scenes of the enclosing
sense of the terrifying reality that these men realise when the come to terms
with their actions, in some shattering revelations. The Act Of Killing is a
very challenging film for almost anyone and truly demonstrates just what
monstrous things human being are capable of, but those who can stomach such
things (keeping in mind that all cases of the violence are only described and
they're already sickening) will find this very illuminating.
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