The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing premiered at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals in 2012, opened the Berlinale Panorama strand in 2013, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th ceremony. The film is an Indonesian / Danish / Norwegian / British co-production, presented by Final Cut for Real with Werner Herzog and Errol Morris as executive producers; over forty members of the Indonesian crew chose to remain anonymous in the final credits, a precaution made necessary by the political sensitivity of the material.

The film returns to the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which approximately one million suspected communists, ethnic Chinese and trade unionists were murdered by army-affiliated paramilitaries. Oppenheimer spent seven years in North Sumatra and convinced Anwar Congo and a small group of his fellow former death-squad members to re-enact their work for the camera in the genre styles (gangster, musical, western) they had absorbed from cinemas during the period. The film alternates between these elaborate re-enactments and quieter present-day footage of the men in their homes, their political affiliations and their public lives.

Critical reception was unusually unanimous: the film was named one of the year's best by Sight & Sound, The Guardian, The Village Voice and the National Board of Review, and it took the European Film Award and the BAFTA for Best Documentary. Oppenheimer's companion film The Look of Silence followed in 2014. The Act of Killing is now standard reference viewing in journalism, anthropology and documentary courses, and remains one of the most discussed pieces of non-fiction filmmaking of the 21st century.