The Act of Killing

At times, you will have a feeling that all of this was staged, that it simply couldn't have happened. That is what makes this documentary even more powerful, because all of this did happen. People here calmly talk about how they killed innocent people, simply because the regime changed, or rather because no one wanted the communists in the country - I mean Indonesia. The protagonists here reminisce about real events - torture and killing - and they laugh about it. It will send chills down your spine. And that is also because of how the film is presented. The camera captures former killers and their conversation, as if capturing a conversation between two mothers in the park. They show off and maybe even realize towards the end what they actually did. Maybe not. However, the viewer will definitely leave the film with a feeling that the world is a slightly worse place again. Not because natural disasters destroy us, but because we willingly destroy ourselves. Terrifying, terrifying testimony. (12.01.2014)

The sixties in Indonesia and their own peculiar solution to the threat of communism. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs... A mirror to a democratic society that partially emerged in consequence of the murder of hundreds of thousands, held in the hand of an entertaining old man enjoying life to the full, an exemplary grandpa, a national hero and also, just by the way, one of the high-ranking executors of the aforementioned slaughter? The horrors of the past that formed history may be presented variously. As a stark list of the horrors, as a portrait of those actively involved and maybe in a couple of other ways. If you are lucky, you can even get some of the culprits in front of the camera. But you probably won’t be so lucky that the culprits will want to actively cooperate to such an extent that they agree to re-enact the horrors that they committed because they feel that the young are no longer aware of what they did for their country and want their heroic acts to leave a mark behind them. And that when preparing for filming they start talking about “how they saw things then and how they see them now". At the strongest moments (and there are lots of them) it is powerful, fascinating and chilling like nothing before; however, it is an indisputable problem that this extraordinary documentary is presented in a form that prevents cutting too deep and getting the best out of it. On the contrary, there is a danger that as a result of its rather exhausting two-hour length, the uninspiring form and the talking heads syndrome, this will bore audiences to tears (if they don’t fall asleep). And that would be a shame if only because the authors gave you a good tip for where to send some of our Communist Party dinosaurs for “re-education". (18.07.2013)