The Act of Killing

I just saw this, and if you have a chance to see it as well, I highly recommend it.

Trailer

Rotten Tomatoes

From the Boston Globe review:

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See this movie. I can’t be more direct. "The Act of Killing" is one of the most extraordinary films you’ll ever encounter, not to mention one of the craziest filmmaking concepts anywhere, and that includes the whole Bollywood thing.

[Director Joshua] Oppenheimer, a Texan and Harvard grad now based in Europe, settles on the central narrative of Anwar Congo, a self-described “gangster” (the word is widely interpreted in Indonesian culture to mean “free man,” as in rebel, as in patriot) who estimates he was responsible for 1,000 executions back in the mid-1960s. That’s when North Sumatra, in the wake of an attempted coup against President Sukarno, became a killing field for enforcers of an anti-communist purge that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, possibly millions, throughout Indonesia. Backed by the army of future President Suharto and his Western allies, men like Congo went from two-bit thugs and hustlers (Congo’s racket was scalping movie tickets) to government-sanctioned thieves, rapists, and murderers. To this day, they’re mostly convinced that they were necessary agents of nation building, and their unrepentant swagger provides the perfect potting soil for Oppenheimer’s equally bold creative ideas.

Instead of just interviewing the killers, which would have been compelling enough given how little most Westerners know about their history, Oppenheimer asks them to dramatize their thoughts and actions as cinema, employing whatever moviemaking techniques and genre tropes inspire them. Thus we get a film within a film, scripted and shaped by Congo with the help of former comrades, that is a schizophrenic mash-up of gangster pulp, film noir, western, drag musical, horror-fantasy, David Lynchian fever dream, and God knows what else. The “cast” includes Adi Zulkadry, a seemingly guilt-free executioner who argues that “war crimes are defined by the winners”; Safit Pardede, an irredeemable brute, extortionist, and misogynist pig; and Herman Koto, who provides comic relief as the fat gangster frequently seen in drag, willing to do just about anything for attention or financial reward. But the leading man at all times is Congo, a dapper old player fond of loud suits (add Blaxploitation to the list of genre inspirations) who turns out to be as repressed as he is candid.

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