Friday, February 7, 2014

The Act of Killing (2014)

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Run Time: 122 min.


"In 1965, paramilitary death squads 'exterminated' over a million countrymen. Never prosecuted, these now elderly men live as folk heroes in North Sumatra.


'I felt as though I had walked into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis were in power,' Oppenheimer told Asia Times Online. Screened last April at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, this stunning 'documentary of the imagination' shows Anwar and other thugs staging scenes of torture and murder for the camera. 

Anwar sits his grandsons on his lap to watch him play a communist strangled by wire, the same technique he used hundreds of times. 'It shows exactly what it’s like to be me,' he says. He also plays a man he beheaded."
—Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun-Times 

(Call number: PN1997.2 .A286 2014)