My Best Dox

The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer
Screening time  
25.02. / Tuesday, 22:00 - 01:00 Theatre 4  
"The Act of Killing" – in which director Joshua Oppenheimer with the help of unpunished, happily integrated and privileged perpetrators (so genre-like!) re-enacts brutal mass killings in Indonesia in the mid-1960s – is a hardly bearable, but then again absolutely necessary viewing experience.

The history of film registers its heroes – filmmakers and works that defied gravity, veered off the tracks and catapulted themselves to the list of canonical works. And even though they no longer break the celluloid ice like they used to, it is clear why we owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Griffith, Welles, Kurosawa or Riefenstahl. It makes it even more interesting to witness in our own time to the people and films after which neither film nor we can and will net ever be the same. The Act of Killing – in which director Joshua Oppenheimer with the help of unpunished, happily integrated and privileged perpetrators (so genre-like!) re-enacts brutal mass killings in Indonesia in the mid-1960s – is a hardly bearable, but then again absolutely necessary viewing experience; a grotesque screen version of the world as a stage (i.e. a fi lm set), on which the final act of (in)humanity, murder, opens a space of redemption in terms of self-transformation into a performance. This ethical snuff , however, does not consist of a single exploitation pixel – all of it is painfully strained in a (Sisyphus’) attempt to grasp the origin of human evil, banal as Arendt would say, frighteningly low-budget.

Mima Simić

Joshua_oppenheimer

Joshua Oppenheimer

Joshua Oppenheimer was born in 1974, Texas, USA. He has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. Educated at Harvard and Central St Martins, London, his award-winning films include The Globalization Tapes, The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase, These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home and numerous shorts. Oppenheimer is Senior Researcher on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Genocide and Genre project and has published widely on these themes.

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The Act of Killing

Denmark, Norway, Great Britain, Finland
2012, 159', DCP

Directed by:
Joshua Oppenheimer

Screenplay by:
Joshua Oppenheimer

Cinematography:
Lars Skree, Carlos Mariano Arango de Montis

Edited by:
Niels Pagh Andersen, Janus Billeskov Jansen, Mariko Montpetit, Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Ariadna Fatjó-Vilas Mestre

Music:
Elin Øysen Vister

Producer:
Signe Byrge Sørensen

Produced by:
Final Cut for Real ApS

Festivals & Awards:

Academy Awards 2014 – Best Feature Documentary Nomination; BAFTA Awards 2014 – Nomination for the Best Film not in the English Language; Berlin International Film Festival 2013 – Ecumenical Jury Prize; Panorama Audience Award; European Film Awards 2013 – Best Documentary Award; Central Ohio Film Critics Association 2014 - Best Documentary; Sheffield International Documentary Festival 2013 - Audience Award, Special Jury Award; Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2013 – Best Documentary Feature Film