The Act of Killing

     This was both the most boring and most fascinating documentary that Hannah and I have yet watched. The Act of Killing is again nominated for today's Academy Awards, though in my opinion it should not win.
     This is the first documentary that we have watched where I had absolutely zero knowledge of its subject. It tells the story of Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry, among others who in 1965 and 1966 were responsible for leading death squads who killed over 500,000 people (The documentary claims up to 2 million though I was unable to confirm this).  The people they killed were supposedly former communists, although even the killers admit that many of them were not. This film is not the history of this genocide however, it is a documentation of an attempt by these murderers to re-enact their killings for posterity and especially international audiences. 

 

      These killers, Anwar and Adi are now leaders in a paramilitary organization in Indonesia called Pemuda Pancasila and hold tremendous power even over the government. Interestingly, Indonesians do not see them as genocidal killers or war criminals, rather they are esteemed by the general public as founding fathers. To this day, through the power of their organization they continue to extort "protection" and "insurance" from the businesses of Chinese immigrants to Indonesia. They are also known to rig elections and so forth.

        The leaders of this organization are proud to brag about the number of people that they have personally killed and describe in great detail how they would perform the killings. They even continue to do so when the American director of the documentary Joshua Oppenheimer openly calls them war criminals and compares them to Hitler in Nazi Germany. They go so far as to say they were greater than Hitler because they were more depraved in the ways that they would kill people.
      As I said before this 90% of this documentary was incredibly sad and difficult to watch. There were extremely long and drawn out sections of this film that showed discussions among these "gangsters"(They continually explain that this term is "an american word that means 'free men'" of how they wanted to dress and act out their killings for the film. This was both very boring, and also very frightening that someone could discuss these actions with such banality. 
      The 10% that redeems this film comes at the end, when Anwar, who has up to this point bragged about personally killing over 1000 people by strangling them with a fine copper wire, plays one of the victims as they act out these tragedies. As a blindfold is put over his face and the wire is wrapped around his neck, you see a visceral reaction as he finally understands the horrors of his actions and breaks down in tears. He again visits the places where he committed the murders, this time with a full realization of what he has done and is repentant (at least outwardly). 
    This is a brilliant documentary (although it could have been much shorter) and I recommend it mainly because so few people know about this genocide. It is also an interesting exploration of the psyche of the people who have done these horrible things.