Proud mass murderers envision themselves as movie stars in Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING
SHORT LIST: THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, November 15, 1:45
Festival runs November 14-21
212-924-7771
www.theactofkilling.com
www.docnyc.net
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is one of the most disturbing, and unusual, films ever made about genocide. In 1965-66, as many as a million supposed communists and enemies of the state were killed in the aftermath of a military coup in Indonesia. Nearly fifty years later, many of the murderers are still living in the very neighborhoods where they committed the atrocities, openly boasting about what they did, being celebrated on television talk shows, and even being asked to run for public office. While making The Globalization Tapes in Indonesia in 2004, the Texas-born Oppenheimer met some of these self-described gangsters and, struck by their brash, bold attitudes, decided to create a different kind of documentary. In addition to following them around as they go bowling, play golf, sing, and dance, proudly showing off how happy their lives are, Oppenheimer offered them the opportunity to tell their story as if it were a Hollywood movie. The men, whose love of American noir and Westerns heavily influenced the stylized killings they perpetrated, loved the idea and began to restage torture and murder scenes in great detail for the camera, getting in period costumes, putting on makeup, going over script details, reviewing the dailies, and playing both the violent criminals and their victims. The leader is master executioner Anwar Congo, who is perhaps the only one haunted by his deeds; although on the surface he is proud of what he did, he is tormented by constant nightmares. Such is not the case for the others, who laugh as they go over the gory details, especially paramilitary leader Herman Koto, Congo’s protégé and a man seemingly without a conscience. Meanwhile, fellow executioner Adi Zulkadry wonders whether telling the truth will actually negatively impact their legendary status. “Human rights! All this talk about ‘human rights’ pisses me off,” Congo says in one scene. “Back then there was no human rights.” Oppenheimer also depicts how frighteningly powerful the three-million-strong, government-connected Pancasila Youth is, ready to fight for the very same things that led to the genocide in the first place. It’s hard to comprehend how these men continue to walk free, and one can argue whether Oppenheimer should indeed be giving them the platform that he does. Watching these gangsters — or “free men,” as they like to call themselves, since the Indonesian word for gangster is “preman,” derived from the Dutch “vrijman” — artistically re-create scenes of horrific violence is both illuminating and infuriating on multiple levels that will leave viewers angry and incredulous. A selection of this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival, The Act of Killing is screening November 15 at 1:45 at the IFC Center as part of the annual DOC NYC fest in the “Short List” category, which consists of films expected to make an impact come awards season; among the other “shortlisted” documentaries, all of which have already been released theatrically, are Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet from Stardom, Dawn Porter’s Gideon’s Army, and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell.
In 1976 France, it’s love at first sight when eight-year-old Boule (Charles Crombez) sets his eyes on cocker spaniel Bill (voiced by Manu Payet) in Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier’s utterly delightful Boule & Bill, based on Jean Roba and Maurice Rosy’s popular comic strip. While Boule’s mother (Marina Foïs), a piano teacher, wants to adopt the dog for her son, his father (Franck Dubosc) is firmly against it. He’s not exactly in favor of adding a lost tortoise, Caroline (voiced by Sara Giraudeau), to the family either. Soon Bill and Caroline are on their way home with the clan, but Boule’s father, a stick-in-the-mud appliance designer, immediately begins planning how to get rid of the dog, even moving the family to an oddball apartment complex in the middle of nowhere. Once there, Bill continues wreaking havoc, including perpetually annoying the depressive neighbor (Nicolas Vaude) one floor below. Meanwhile, Caroline falls madly in love with Bill. But when Boule and Bill go too far, his parents begin considering whether they have to give the dog away. From the opening scene, it’s apparent that Boule & Bill is no mere silly kiddie movie, as Mother, Father, and Son are in their little red car, singing a song about male genitalia. Charlot and Franck, who previously collaborated on Imogène McCarthery, load the charming tale with laugh-out-loud flourishes, from the mother’s encounters with the downstairs depressive to Bill’s turning himself into a stuffed animal in an emergency. A series of brief dream sequences, along with several plot twists, feel forced and unnecessary, but Charlot and Franck always manage to turn things around and get back on track. And they really have a ball with Bill’s deepest dog thoughts, reminiscent of Jean Shepherd’s narration in A Christmas Story. Running at the Quad November 8-14, Boule & Bill is a colorful, fun adventure that is more than just your average boy meets dog movie. 
Photographer Edward Burtynsky has been traveling the world with his large-format viewfinder camera, taking remarkable photographs of environmental landscapes undergoing industrial change. For Manufactured Landscapes, cinematographer Peter Mettler and director Jennifer Baichwal joined Burtynsky on his journey as he documented ships being broken down in Chittagong, Bangladesh; the controversial development of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China, which displaced more than a million people; the uniformity at a factory in Cankun that makes irons and the Deda Chicken Processing Plant in Dehui City; as well as various mines and quarries. Burtynsky’s photos, which were on view at the Brooklyn Museum in late 2005 and often can be seen in New York City galleries (two shows just closed last week), are filled with gorgeous colors and a horrible sadness at the lack of humanity they portray. As in the exhibit, the audience is not hit over the head with facts and figures and environmental rhetoric; instead, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, although Burtynsky does give some limited narration. Baichwal lets the camera linger on its subject, as in the remarkable opening shot, a long, slow pan across a seemingly endless factory. She is also able to get inside the photographs, making them appear to be three-dimensional as Mettler slowly pulls away. Manufactured Landscapes is screening November 12 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Peter Mettler: Pictures of Light,” a midcareer retrospective of the innovative Canadian artist that also features eight shorts and full-length documentaries he directed, including Picture of Light, The End of Time, Plastikman, Petropolis, and Gambling, Gods, and LSD, with Mettler on hand to talk about his work at most shows. In addition, Mettler will participate in the free White Light Festival panel discussion “It’s a Matter of Time” on November 9 at 4:30 with Sylvia Boorstein, Daniel Casasanto, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Alan Lightman and a performance of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” by Alan Pierson and Chris Thompson, moderated by John Schaefer.