this looks intense.

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Stunning trailer.

I would rather watch this than any 500+ hollywood blockbusters playing in the local multiplexes.

True

Got this email today from Drafthouse:


Friends Of The Alamo Drafthouse –

I have never done this before, and I promise that I will not be making such an ask very often, if ever again.

Drafthouse Films is distributing THE ACT OF KILLING, which opens in New York exclusively at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema tomorrow (July 19th), and will be rolling out to over 30 cities in subsequent weeks, including Austin, LA, DC and many more. In THE ACT OF KILLING, the filmmakers examine a country where death squad leaders are celebrated as heroes and challenge them to reenact their real-life mass killings in the style of the American movies they love.

This film DEMANDS to be seen. THE ACT OF KILLING is not just one of the best documentaries ever made; it is one of the best movies I have ever seen. Not only that, this film has the power to spur on significant political change and expose a present day regime and society founded on the celebration of crimes against humanity. Because of this, I am reaching out to everyone I know to help us spread the word.

But please don’t just take my word for it. Titans of the documentary world Errol Morris and Werner Herzog both saw the completed film and immediately pledged their names and support as executive producers. You can check out our trailer here and watch Werner and Errol discuss why they had to be involved in the film here.

The overwhelmingly positive critical response has also been staggering. I've included just a few of the amazing accolades so far:

"★★★★★ The most compelling thing you'll ever see...
Almost every frame is astonishing" –The Guardian

"Could well change how you view the documentary form" –Los Angeles Times

“The Act of Killing is one of the few films now in theaters that demands to be seen” –The Nation

"A radical development in the documentary form and as an explosive journalistic expose" –CNN

“ A towering achievement in filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.” –The Playlist

"To dub Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary a masterpiece is at once warranted and yet somehow limiting, the term too narrow for what the first-time filmmaker
achieves with his debut" – Village Voice


So here is the specific ask:

Please help us shout from the mountaintops about THE ACT OF KILLING and help us achieve a successful opening weekend at the Sunshine so we can continue giving the film the attention and audience it deserves as we open in additional markets across the country.

Whether you live in NY or not, tweet about it (@TheActOfKilling), post it on Facebook, send emails to your NYC friends and go see it yourself, preferably on opening weekend if you're in the city. Let people know that THE ACT OF KILLING is THE must-see film of the year and should be absolutely required viewing for any fan of cinema.

The film opens on July 19th at the Sunshine and tickets are on sale now. Director Joshua Oppenheimer will be in attendance and conducting Q&As for several screenings during opening weekend. For more information on the film and openings in other cities, please visit actofkilling.com

Thanks for your help!

Tim League
founder/CEO
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Drafthouse Films
Fantastic Fest

Wow the Alamo is so progressive! That is literally the most outdated and clichéd piece of marketing flim-flam I've ever fucking read. It's cool to see that in 2013 they're still marketing films the same what they did in the 1930's. "It's a must see. Tell your friends. Don't just listen to us, read what the critics have to say."

I wouldn't complain except it's annoying to read 500+ words about a film and see no mention of who the filmmakers are, what country they're from, what country the subject of the film takes place in...you know SOMETHING RELEVENT. If you want me to tweet my twat to everyone I know about a film I've never seen how about giving me information, not marketing speak. If I'm supposed to trumpet that this film "changes the documentary form" could I get a little detail about how exactly it does this? Or am I just supposed to parrot the marketing speak?

And I mean no dissrespect to the film or its makers. It looks like an excellent film about a sensitive and frightening subject that should be addressed without the PT Barnum style "shout from the mountaintops" bullshit marketing bluster.

Won't be here in NYC for the opening but once I am back I am sure to be seeing this.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-07-...ct-of-killing/

The Act of Killing Is a Masterpiece of Murder and the Movies

More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance.

To dub Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary a masterpiece is at once warranted and yet somehow limiting, the term too narrow for what the first-time American filmmaker achieves with his debut. A sprawling study of the aftermath of the 1960s mass killings in Indonesia by Suharto's coup-installed military regime and death squads, the film morphs, in ways both ghastly and glorious, into an examination of institutionalized violence, guilt on individual and national scales, and the role of cinema to both shape and reflect our darkest impulses.

The Act of Killing shares the keen eye for investigation that defines the nonfiction work of its illustrious producers, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. And like their docs, it spirals into horrifying surrealism from a seemingly simple starting point: in this case, interviewing some of the paramilitary leaders and self-described "gangsters" employed to eradicate anyone deemed a "communist"—in practice, almost anyone not loyal to the new regime.

The surprise is that these men are eager to tell their tales, often indulging in graphic detail to describe, for example, the best means of murdering captives without spilling much blood (with a wire around the neck). They even enjoy re-enacting their state-sanctioned murders on camera, at Oppenheimer's invitation, adopting the lurid styles of the violent Hollywood crime films that influenced their actual violence back in the day.

Oppenheimer opens with the killers making their movie. We see the rotund, disheveled Herman Koto and the slender, debonair Anwar Congo—the latter responsible for more than 1,000 murders, many carried out with that wire-strangling technique—searching neighborhoods they once attacked for locals to play parts in a re-enactment. What follows is ugly, even mad: Surrounded by a throng of onlookers, a proud and enthusiastic Herman shows the crowd how to panic. He flails his arms and screams hysterically as he pretends to be a woman begging that her house not be burned down. At first confused, a few women comply with Herman's demands to mimic this performance; later, the kids forced to participate in this upsetting pantomime are quickly brought to tears. It's impossible to forget that some of these people might have suffered real crimes at Herman's and Anwar's hands.

That's just one example of how the documentary twists reality and fiction. That knottiness culminates with Anwar's neighbor recalling to these killers his own tale of woe, when his stepfather answered a nighttime knock at the door in 1965 and was never seen again. Speaking with nervous laughter, the neighbor professes to Anwar and Herman that he of course means no criticism with his story—and then, to prove it, he agrees to play the role of a strangled victim in a scene set in a nightclub, pretending to be choked to death by the men responsible for the deaths of members of his family.

These monsters proudly proclaim that their work in the '60s was influenced by the movies, although they anachronistically cite Scarface and The Godfather as direct influences on both their tactics and their sleek, swanky fashion sense. It's also clear that their madness stems from something deeper in the country's fabric. The Act of Killing examines these killers' relationship to the 3 million–strong paramilitary organization Pancasila Youth, which continues to operate outside Indonesian law even as it works in tandem with the government. In a stunning scene, the country's vice president speaks to the group, jokingly condoning their blackmail-and-beatings thuggery. What emerges is a portrait of systemic fanaticism and brutality celebrated by both the political powers that be and TV personalities who merrily praise the men's noble "extermination" work.

Damning only through incisive observation, Oppenheimer presents Indonesia as a country where the reigning historical narrative validates mass murder as necessary and good. That means glorified horror abounds in the men's re-creations of their atrocities, such as the massacre of a village full of women and children—a sequence that culminates with one paramilitary strongman's boastful recollections about raping 14-year-old girls. This vileness goes hand in hand with surrealism, none more surprising than a musical number in which the men (including a cross-dressing Herman) and dancers emerge from a giant seaside fish statue. As they sway in front of a waterfall, some of their "victims" appear to thank them for murdering them. Then the killers ascend to heaven.

Anwar and Herman's cold-hearted compatriot Adi Zulkadry believes that his assassinations were justified because he committed them, got away with them, and continues to be praised for them. That ruthless winners-write-history morality is countered by the transformation of Anwar, who by placing himself in the role of those he killed—including one fictionalized re-creation designed like a '20s gangster movie—finds himself increasingly horrified, maybe even driven insane, by what he's done. Anwar's awakened self-awareness is a stunning example of the cinema's power to expose truth and alter perception. Healing, however, is a commodity in short supply in The Act of Killing, which affords neither hope for a brighter Indonesian future nor salvation for Anwar. In a final scene of literal gut-wrenching intensity, he visits his old rooftop-courtyard killing ground. Left alone with the memories of his sins, he's wracked with uncontrollable retching. Nothing, though, will come up—it's a lifetime's worth of evil finally rising to the surface, but still impossible to purge.

I'd rather eat my shoe than watch this.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-07-...-killing/full/

Joshua Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing

Though director Joshua Oppenheimer filmed in the late '00s, the story of The Act of Killing begins in 1965, with General Suharto's overthrow of Indonesia's first post-colonial government and the subsequent purge of ethnic Chinese, Communists, and intellectuals.To distance itself from the genocide, the government created by the coup turned to Pemuda Pancasila, a paramilitary group, to carry out the executions. Pancasila's members are widely regarded as "gangsters" in Indonesian society, muscle for the government when it operates outside the reach of the law. The Act of Killing takes as its main subject Anwar Congo, a Pancasila member and death squad leader who claims personal responsibility for more than 1,000 of the 1 million dead.

We spoke with Oppenheimer last week.

To what extent do you position this film as an intervention?

That's a really good way of putting it. I began this project in collaboration with a community of survivors. They started by sending me on these missions to meet the perpetrators who they thought killed their relatives, because they didn't know how their loved ones had died. They were taken away, and they never returned. And then as I encountered the perpetrators, they were boasting, they were proud, and I realized it was as though I had walked into Nazi Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, and the Nazis were still in power.

As we continued filming, we were getting stopped by the army, we were being arrested, were having our equipment and tapes taken. I had this feeling: "Should we not do this? Is it too dangerous? Is it too sensitive?" And the Indonesian human rights community, such as they are, and the survivors themselves said, "You must continue. You're onto something. We need a film that unmasks this regime, that exposes the nature of this regime."

I wanted to create a space for people to say the things that they've been to afraid to say yet already know. So in fact, it was precisely a kind of intervention of how a whole regime has told stories to justify what they've done and to build a normality on the basis of terror and lies. I think I never really dared hope that it would make that impact. Maybe I hoped it would make an impact internationally, and then the Indonesians would take notice.

The film challenges the audience to work through and weigh multiple narratives, and even the nature of narrative itself, all at once. Where does that complexity spring from?

The film broadly is about how we tell stories to create our reality, and how as a crucial part of that we tell stories to escape from our most bitter and indigestible truths—the parts of that reality we don't want to face. I think one of the stories we tell—probably the dominant story we tell, all of us—is that the world is divided up into good guys and bad guys. It's the Star Wars story. We tell it again and again, and it underpins almost every story we tell. I think every time we tell it, it's a lie.

The word in Indonesian for "gangster" really does come from [the English for] "free man." [Anwar and his friends are] not just saying that. They fall back on that to justify, to give a kind of slightly heroic nuance to Pemuda Pancasila, this alternative power structure that Indonesian politicians and businessmen and the whole regime uses to do their dirty work.

How do these men justify their crimes?

The tragedy implicit [in this film] is that once you've corrupted yourself, by taking one life through a kind of an original sin, the justification demands further evil. You then have to suppress the survivors so that they don't challenge your version of the story, so that they don't accuse you. That then legitimates stealing their land, shaking them down, extorting them, because you've blamed them for what happened to them. And it demands, most chillingly, that you kill again if called upon. If you don't do it, if you refuse, it's tantamount to admitting it was wrong the first time. There's this downward spiral of evil and corruption ,which creates this terrifying world.

Anwar and his friends approach the re-enactment as a celebration of their deeds. How do you maneuver or maybe reconcile the bald-faced bragging and Anwar's growing guilt over his part in the mass killings?

When I was entrusted by this community of survivors to film these justifications, to film these boastings, I was trying to expose and interrogate the nature of impunity. Boasting about killing was the right material to do that with because it is a symptom of impunity. You can't dance in the place where you've killed 1,000 people if you've been told this was the wrong thing to do. To do that you have to be in utter denial about what you've done. That denial is fed by impunity, and there is an insistence on that denial and a demonstration of impunity at the same time.

Boasting is not a sign of lack of remorse, but its opposite. That's the paradox in the film. Anwar says he's a good dancer because he's drinking and taking drugs and going out dancing to forget. His conscience is there from the beginning. He's desperately trying to escape the real meaning of what he's done, and every re-enactment is an effort to escape the meaning of what he's done, just in the way he used cinema to escape what he'd done at the time of the killings.

The film has had an extraordinary reception in Indonesia and is increasing scrutiny on the regime there. You almost get the sense that the point was a kind of global reckoning rather than just to transform the Indonesian political order.

Every article of clothing touching our bodies is haunted by the suffering of the people who make it for us, all of them working in places where there's been mass violence where perpetrators have won. They have used their victory to create regimes of fear where the people who make everything we buy are so suppressed and their labor so cheap that the human cost of everything we buy is not incorporated in the price that we pay for it.

The Act of Killing is not about a distant killing on the other side of the world. It's about the underbelly of our reality, "brutal underbelly of global capitalism." If the film has any key message that's universal, it's just this: Everybody already knows everything. We know it. Just as Anwar knows what he did was wrong and is trying to run away from it the whole time, and just as Indonesians know this happened. They know their society is a kind of pseudo-democracy built on fear and mass graves.

We know that the lives we live depend on the suffering of others. We depend on Anwar and his friends or men just like them all over the world for our daily living. We all are, in a way, guests at Anwar and his friends' cannibalistic feast. We may not be as close to the slaughter, but we're at the table. And I think this harms us.

We are withdrawing from reality, withdrawing from each other, withdrawing into obsessive egoism, consumerism, and also escapist fantasies that we are like the good guys in the stories that we consume.

What links the political and social fabric of Indonesia to the one here in the States?

[One of the death squad leaders] took me down with a fellow squad leader to the riverbank where he'd helped kill 10,500 people at one spot by just cutting off their heads. After showing me how he went about it with his friend, he pulls out a little camera and asks my sound recordist to take pictures of him and his fellow death squad member posing with the river flowing behind them with the thumbs-up and the V for victory. This was in February 2004.

In April 2004 come the photographs from Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers are giving thumbs-up and V for victory while humiliating and torturing people. The question is not so much about the violence that is documented in the photos, but a much bigger, systemic violence and a cultural, moral, political vacuum in which these snapshots are conceivable as mementos of a happy occasion.

I then made The Act of Killingand the work that led up to it contemporaneously with this evolving nightmare in this country where the greater part of the political establishment was celebrating torture. And just as the perpetrators in the The Act of Killing celebrate mass murder, the celebration I think from the beginning was defensive—if you think the tone of [Dick] Cheney and Rush Limbaugh in fact was defensive.

And it's defensive personally—they're probably trying to convince themselves even as, more frighteningly, they're imposing that on everybody else. And when you're imposing that on everybody else there's a veiled threat.

Yeah I got that Drafthouse email. I'll probably be seeing it but not at the Drafthouse.

inri, thank you for all of that excellent information. Sounds like a very intense film. Certainly deserving of more considered marketing then that stupid email from the Alamo.

I just bought Shoah from Criterion and I feel I need to see that film before this.

Herzog and the director will be at the Landmark theater in L.A. Tonight. The Director will then be in D.C. this weekend, which I plan to attend.

Fuck, I have to work tonight. I've actually met Herzog twice so I guess I'm okay.

Are you sure you don't mean the Nuart?

Yeah, the Nuart, I guess it's part of Landmark and each theater has their own name (in D.C. we're E Street):

http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Mark...s_Frameset.htm

This was pretty powerful. Glad I went to see it.

Saw this tonight. A bit long (a comment I honestly make about 80% of films) but it doesn't lessen the power. Highly recommended.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=12743

The Act of Killing comes to Blu-ray on January 14, 2014.

The Blu-ray release of The Act of Killing features both the original 122-minute theatrical release and a significantly longer 166-minute director's cut.

Supplemental content includes:

•Audio Commentary with Oppenheimer and Herzog
•45-minute interview with Oppenheimer on Democracy Now!
•VICE Presents: Herzog and Morris on The Act of Killing
•Deleted scenes
•Trailers
•40-page booklet featuring an essay by Morris

Watched this today...not impressed.

It felt much longer than its 2 hour run time. The entire film is Oppenheimer's cameras following around Anwar Congo as he reminisces and recreates scenes about life back as an executioner. His recreations involve his friends and random people they meet on the street. I thought the recreations were very uninteresting and sometimes just really weird. I was never captivated.

Sure, it's stunning at first seeing how open and comfortable Congo is about being responsible for thousands of deaths, but after 20 minutes my interest had subsided and I grew bored.

I don't think it's a bad movie, it just didn't work for me.

Well, I completely disagree. I think it was one of the best films of 2013. The whole thing was so surreal, and downright creepy. An incredible study on the role of violence in our world.

This is now on Netflix for your streaming pleasure.

Just watched the director's cut and I agree. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen. This is not just a film about Indonesia, it is about all humanity and what it is capable of.

5/5

I agree, there's a pretty distinct line between those who are floored by it and those who think: 'meh' I fall into the latter. Personally I think I'd want to slam my forehead onto a rusty nail before (or during) a screening of the 166 minute version

I think that's why it didn't win the Oscar for best doc. I think it went completely over the heads of a majority of those who had to watch it and vote on it (or not).

Just found this on Netflix - should I watch the theatrical or director's cut? Can't seem to find a general consensus on the Internet.

I've only seen the director's cut and it was an amazing experience. It did not feel like it was 2 hrs & 40 min.

I'd just go with the directors cut, I tried both and neither did much for me, but if you're into it the DC's added 40 minutes adds to it.