Joshua Oppenheimer, DK + ID 2012.

For my goodbye movie, I gave our booking team four cheerful movies and one heck-of-a-documentary that could scare even Charles Manson shitless. Looks like we’re in for a treat!

In ‘The Act of Killing’, director Joshua Oppenheimer concludes his 14 year long attempt to make a film about the mass killings in Indonesia during the mid-60. Where he initially wanted to make a film about the survivors, he was hindered time and time by people higher in the pick order. The resulting film sees two of cinema’s most unlikely protagonists, Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, tell the story of their contribution to the purge by re-enacting the killings via a variety of cinematic genres of their liking, ranging from Westerns and Horrors to full-fledged Musical with a waterfall for a set.

The result of this approach is a ‘making of’-documentary tracking Anwar and Herman’s progression over the years in making their desired film. The film is full of beauty, the Bahasa language, contemplations on the soul, the outrageous abundance of Indonesian culture. But, even more so, the film is a startlingly human portrayal of banal evil, a culture of impunity, and the tiresome need for hypocrisy in individuals tortured by deep black hole pressing on their soul. It is quite simply the best documentary ever made.

If you want to learn more about the survivors, please also watch ‘The Sound of Silence’, released two years later.

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