{"id":30141,"date":"2014-02-08T18:23:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-09T02:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=30141"},"modified":"2014-02-16T23:25:04","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T07:25:04","slug":"the-act-of-killing-joshua-oppenheimer-2012-denmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=30141","title":{"rendered":"The Act of killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012): Denmark"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Act_of_Killing\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Filippa Hernius. Viewed at the Metro 4 Theatre, Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n

This is a very interesting documentary. The director is Joshua Oppenheimer.<\/p>\n

Anwar Congo and his friends have been part of the film industry in Indonesia.\u00a0 They have dancing their way through musical numbers, being a part of <\/span>gangster scenes, and riding through prairies like yodelling cowboys. Their foray into filmmaking is being celebrated in the media and debated on television. There’s just a little “but” in this story. Anwar Congo and his friends are mass murderers in Indonesia. When the government of Indonesia was taken over by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market<\/span> to death squad leaders. They helped the army to\u00a0kill more than one million communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a scene in the movie when Anwar is showing the place, and exactly how, they executed these innocent people. The worst part is that he doesn’t show any emotions at all. They used a wire to kill, it was the fastest way to do it. He is talking into the camera and tells us how bloody it was and uew, it smelled disgusting. No emotion, just pride. They had seen wire-killings in a gangster movie and got inspired by that.<\/p>\n

To understand why, this documentary team asked Anwar and his friends to create scenes about the killings in whatever ways they wished. The film is about that process and documents its consequences.<\/p>\n

So Anwar is almost the right hand to the leader in Indonesia, who said: “Communism will never be accepted here because we have so many gangsters, and that’s a good thing.” They like “free men” in Indonesia, and by free men they mean gangsters.<\/p>\n

In one scene, the camera is following Anwars friend who is going around on a market. He is walking up to a Chinese man in one of the stands and just order money from him. The chinese obviously do what he says, or else he probably get killed. It’s sad to see the fear in his eyes. What right does this man have to just take his money..? No right at all, but he’s a gangster.<\/p>\n

I think it was cool that they mixed up the seriousness with music and dancing. Almost like an Indonesian music video. They stood by a waterfall and it was beautiful. But\u00a0on the same time I couldn’t really enjoy it because of my discomfort of the actual theme.<\/p>\n

Without telling you to much, the film is getting better in the end, in\u00a0a “empathy-perspective”. If you like documentaries, you should definitely see this one. It’s really interesting to see how people works. In some circumstances anything can\u00a0get normal, this was a part of their living. But if they look at their killings with other eyes (the scenes they recorded), will they change their mind?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Filippa Hernius. Viewed at the Metro 4 Theatre, Santa Barbara. This is a very interesting documentary. The director is Joshua Oppenheimer. Anwar Congo and his friends have been part of the film industry in Indonesia.\u00a0 They have dancing their way through musical numbers, being a part of gangster scenes, and riding through prairies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}