The Act Of Killing [Director's Cut]
The astonishing, extended director's cut of the 2013 Academy Award® Nominee for Best Documentary!
Werner Herzog on The Act of Killing’s director’s cut:
"Director's cuts quite often are simply too long, but with THE ACT OF KILLING the opposite occurs. It gains in depth, taking you into a vortex of fever dreams, pulling you deep inside the nightmares of the protagonists. You find yourself drawn irrevocably into the darkest souls, and time acquires a different role, as if you and the world had stopped breathing. The shorter version is trimmed to emphasize its political content, but Joshua Oppenheimer's film is much more than a political documentary. It is a masterpiece of filmmaking, full of depth, surrealism, and stunning silences that will outlive the political message. Have patience. In half a century from now, this film will still stand out as something no one has ever seen before, and no one will ever see again. And it is the director's cut that will be the only version remaining.”
In THE ACT OF KILLING, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, the filmmakers expose a corrupt regime that celebrates death squad leaders as heroes.
When the Indonesian government was overthrown in 1965, small-time gangster Anwar Congo and his friends went from selling movie tickets on the black market to leading death squads in the mass murder of over a million opponents of the new military dictatorship. Anwar boasts of killing hundreds with his own hands, but he's enjoyed impunity ever since, and has been celebrated by the Indonesian government as a national hero. When approached to make a film about their role in the genocide, Anwar and his friends eagerly comply—but their idea of being in a movie is not to provide reflective testimony. Instead, they re-create their real-life killings as they dance their way through musical sequences, twist arms in film noir gangster scenes, and gallop across prairies as Western cowboys. Through this filmmaking process, the moral reality of the act of killing begins to haunt Anwar and his friends with varying degrees of acknowledgment, justification and denial.
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