SUNDAY 13 |When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing, for which Herzog later signed on as executive producer, isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s actual documented history, which is what makes its horrors that much harder to bear. First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second-greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people. And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see.
WHO: First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer
WHAT: The Act Of Killing screening
WHERE: Empire, #30 Street 130.
WHEN: 4pm April 13
WHY: “Raw, terrifying, and painfully difficult to watch, The Act Of Killing offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema.” – rottentomatoes.com