The Act of Killing - 2013

After taking a break/losing interest in writing, I finally watched a film that made we want to write.  Hopefully some people read this, and a majority of them check out this movie because it's absolutely worth your time.  I have never seen a movie like this.  It's simultaneously horrifying and fascinating.  I found myself not really wanting to learn more about the events that transpired or the people that performed them but unable to take my eyes away. As the movie pushes on it continues to go deeper and deeper and brings up emotions that I haven't had watching a film.

The Act of Killing is a documentary that not only interviews some key players in the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66, but asks them to recreate scenes from their memory and film it.  The majority of the film focuses on Anwar Congo, a self-described gangster that has killed roughly 1,000 people.  Anwar gleefully jokes and laughs about how he killed people, even going as far as to show us a spot where he killed hundreds of people by strangling them with wire.  One scene in particular that I cannot shake is when the step-son of a Chinese Communist tells Anwar and his friends a story in which his father was kidnapped late one night and they found him several days later dead and buried under a barrel.  The man telling the story seems nervous mentioning this in front of Anwar but for some reason the man telling the story is smiling the entire time.  I just can't wrap my head around it.

The really terrifying thing about this movie is that the people responsible for many of these murders still hold power in the country.  The film shows Anwar on a daytime-esque talk show joking about how he copied killing methods from popular films at the time.  Many of the others involved still hold high positions in government or in media.  Both of whom proudly exclaim they lied or twisted facts in order to justify killing the people they were questioning. Out of the killings of the communists the Pancasila Youth paramilitary party formed and is still a major political party in Indonesia today. The director, Joshua Oppenheimer, compares this to Germany if the Nazis were still in power 40-50 years after WW2.

The real beauty of the film, despite how incredibly raw and real it is, is that some of the characters slowly start realizing the faults of their beliefs.  Many of the characters have tried to rationalize or justify it in some way, but admit that it still torments them.  There's just something totally remarkable about watching someone suddenly realize what they've done.

A+