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In this chilling and inventive documentary, the unrepentant former members of Indonesian death squads are challenged to re-enact some of their many murders in the style of the American movies they love.
Disturbing, surreal and entirely engrossing, The Act of Killing has been making waves as much for its daring originality as for its chilling content. Joshua Oppenheimer dedicated a decade of his life to creating this beautiful, terrible vision, finding that in a society where glorified mass-murderers live amongst the families of their victims, he had to find a new kind of filmmaking to get to the heart of his subject matter.
By working with the perpetrators of the 1960s Indonesian genocide to re-enact their crimes in the glamorous, hyper-real style of Hollywood movies, Oppenheimer broke all the rules of documentary filmmaking, creating a genre-bending hybrid that is piercing on both a factual and emotional level.