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. 

Cutie and the Boxer

   I was not sure what to expect when I chose this documentary for this week, but I certainly did not expect what we saw. Cutie and the Boxer was our latest choice for documentary and again it is nominated for Best Documentary at the 2014 Academy Awards. It is also my current pick to win though we have yet to see The Art of Killing or 20 Feet from Stardom.

    This film was about two married Japanese artists, Ushio and Noriko Shinohara and specifically about their marriage of 41 years. It is a beautifully filmed story of a seemingly troubled marriage. Throughout the film it seems as if Noriko harbors strong dislike if not hatred for her husband and their life of poverty in SoHo. Through her artistic narration we see the story of how he took advantage of her needs as a young immigrant and then how she felt trapped when they had a child very quickly. Ushio fell into alcoholism soon after and was very abandoning of his family.

     Interspersed through Noriko's comic book like story telling is video both from the past and present of Ushio and his views of himself and his wife. On the one hand Ushio seems to need constant reassurance that his artwork is any good, and his wife constantly gives this to him. Noriko, on the other hand, knows her artwork is good and insists upon promoting and showing it despite constant criticism from Ushio who seems to be jealous of her confidence and ability.

    This was a very beautiful film that captured the story of a lifetime remarkably well. By far the best scene of the entire piece was played during the credits and I will not spoil it. Go log on to Netflix and watch it.

The Square

    So this week we watched The Square which is a very new documentary (A Netflix Original in fact) that has been nominated for the Best Documentary of 2014. For those of you who don't know, it is the story of the Egyptian Revolution, which largely takes place around the Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt and follows the story of people who call themselves revolutionaries while at the same time differentiating themselves from the Islamic Brotherhood.

     By pure coincidence, Hannah and I watched this on the 3 year anniversary of the start of the revolution on January 25th, 2011. After seeing this film, I was left with two thoughts.  First, it was sad to see the disharmony of the Egyptian people. At the start of the documentary, Egypt had been under what was essentially a totalitarian rule for 30 years and the youth of Egypt started to hold protests. As the protests grew in power and numbers the Islamic Brotherhood (according to the people featured in the documentary) began to latch on to this movement as a way to gain political power of their own. Eventually an election was held and Dr. Mohammed Morsy (reportedly a Muslim Brotherhood lapdog) was elected president by a margin of 52%.  The Revolutionaries (who, again, were very careful to differentiate themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood) were displeased but said they would give him a year to make changes. Almost exactly a year later those revolutionaries again began protesting, saying that since they could not defeat him in elections, this was the only way to remove him from power. The military, after two days of protesting by reportedly "Millions" of people, then ousted Morsy and put him under house arrest. This angered the Islamic Brotherhood who then organized their own protests. After these protests continued for a month, the military controlled government moved in and killed hundreds of protesters as they broke up the "sit ins".

There is a very emotional scene in the documentary where a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the original revolutionaries, is speaking with a non brotherhood revolutionary over the phone saying that this is never what they had intended for their revolution. In my opinion, this is the only redeeming scene of the film. It was very sad to me to see the the disunity of the Egyptian people, how one group could care less about the needs, beliefs and feelings of another group. It is sad to me that the people of Egypt felt that a coup was the only way to get rid of an elected official. Is there no way of recalling the President or otherwise removing him from office?

     My second thought about this documentary was that it was very one sided and therefore it was extremely difficult to determine some balance of what the truth might be. As you watch, it is extremely hard to follow along with what is occurring because there is no narration other than the revolutionaries explaining their actions. At one point, the protagonist was either shot or hit with a rock. We see his head bleeding and several doctors gathered around him and frantic and confused Arabic being translated, "Is he dying!? Was he shot? Was it a rock?" This is never again mentioned in the film. The film is full of anecdotes like this where it is impossible to determine what is actual truth because it is all essentially hearsay.  This troubles me mainly because this documentary was nominated for an Academy Award and I would hope that our standards for documentaries would be high enough that we might actually might learn something factual when we see them. Now, what I will say for this film is that it was very beautifully filmed. We see excellent footage of the raw scenes of fighting which is interspersed with film that clearly shows the devotion that the revolutionaries feel for their country and their compatriots.  In this sense, the film is quite moving.
    Over all, I would recommend this documentary only if you already are familiar with the turmoil in Egypt and would like to see the man on the ground perspective or if you are interested in the films nominated for the Academy Awards, just don't expect to learn very much actual fact.