Third place:
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley) [72 points / 18 votes]
Second place:
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel) [77 points / 18 votes]
And your winner...
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer & Christine Cynn & Anonymous) [160 points / 37 votes]
"You’ve never seen anything like Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed The Act of Killing, and hopefully you never will again. In fact, the documentary about the perpetrators of Indonesia’s genocide two generations ago is so compelling and convicting, if seen widely enough it could potentially prevent such atrocities from happening again. But I’m not that naïve – humanity is, has been, and always will be cursed with evil tendencies. Whether that evil surfaces in terror attacks, genocides, or daily violence in your neighborhood, there are typically three constants: those who commit crime, those who suffer from it, and those who passively observe it. The Act of Killing muddles this paradigm by adding a fourth category: those who celebrate it.
Having spent years in Indonesia unsuccessfully trying to document the experience of survivors of a genocide that is largely unknown in the United States (perhaps because it happened during the heart of the American civil rights movement and increasing involvement in Vietnam), Oppenheimer instead decided to interview the men responsible for the mass killings - men like Anwar Congo, men who enjoy celebrity stature in a country that has never sought justice for the victims. It was in this decision to look evil in the eye that led to The Act of Killing, and, as Oppenheimer described in an interview with Sight and Sound, it was suddenly a much easier film to make: “Anwar was the 41st perpetrator I filmed, and the first 40 were equally open and boastful. I started in a village of survivors, and worked my way up a chain of command until I met people well above Anwar. He was along the way. And the people I filmed all, within minutes, volunteered not just to tell me what they’d done but to take me to the places where they killed, show me how they did it and bring along machetes to use as props, friends to play their victims.”
Oppenheimer has compared this situation to an alternate reality in which the Nazis emerged victorious from World War II and the SS are celebrated as national heroes while leadership in the Third Reich enjoy permanent control of the government to this day. Comparing genocides is folly, but the point drives home how torturous an existence daily life in Indonesia is for the survivors and families of the estimated 500,000 victims targeted as Communists or sympathizers (with tacit support from the American government). Not only have Anwar Congo and his many peers never been brought to justice, but it has been considered taboo to broach the subject in public conversation. In this way, Oppenheimer’s film is similar to Enemies of the People (2009), a similar documentary about the leaders of Cambodia’s genocide, with the primary difference being that the Khmer Rouge was vanquished and its leaders were held publicly accountable for their actions.
One of the reasons the celebrated status of the perpetrators in Indonesia is so horrifying, and what makes The Act of Killing so powerful, is that the massacres were not carried out in gas chambers or other impersonal methods. The victims were often tortured before being shot, strangled, stabbed or beheaded, as the men in the film so willingly demonstrate and recreate in a film-within-a-film that they produce with Oppenheimer’s support if not necessarily his encouragement (“I felt I was entrusted with a work of historical and moral importance, exposing a regime of impunity through its celebration of killing”).
And so The Act of Killing becomes a vivid examination of the act of killing, a surreal, multi-layered study of depravity and cruelty that tests viewers’ notions of the nature of evil and the capacity for it to flourish in “normal” people. It is through this lens that Oppenheimer’s thesis becomes disturbing at an even deeper level. It’s one thing to see a murderer boast and joke about killing in that they remain safely alien; it’s a much different, much more intimate experience to see a murderer ultimately feel guilt and shame, and when Anwar dry heaves and questions his past deeds near the end of the film, he becomes that much more fully human, that much closer to you and me. As Oppenheimer explains, “the whole film is an attempt to understand the imagination of a regime of impunity – and what happens to our humanity when we build our normality on terror and lies, and we use storytelling to deny the most awful parts of our reality, not to see it for what it is.” The Act of Killing illustrates that truth in excruciating detail, and raises all kinds of questions about the violence we condemn vs. the violence we initiate, tolerate, and deny. It is a groundbreaking documentary, a rude awakening for Indonesia after years of festering silence, and a film that, we must all hope, never enjoys a sequel." - Daniel Getahun
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