It takes wisdom and character to be able to portray the humanity of a mass-murderer, to find beauty in absolute horror, and to forgive and embrace such deep contradictions. Oppenheimer is not making a sequel of his extraordinary The Act of Killing, but an “in-quel”: he gets inside his previous film and goes deeper, digging bravely in the mass murdering of communists in 1960s Indonesia. And he’s not just observing now: here, he states his opinions and takes sides, because he aims to transform the very present. The subtle subversion of his previous film now gives room to a heartbreaking denunciation: Adi, the ophthalmologist who leads the story, faces the murderers and reveals their own monstrosity to them. This confrontation features no justice or mourning, only an immensely pathetic feeling, a society split in half through bloodshed. Sponsored by Herzog and Errol Morris, Oppenheimer again conjugates intelligence, beauty, and a huge empathy with the people he portrays, who drink the blood of their victims as a magic spell so they can look at themselves in the mirror. GS
Sections: Panorama Competencia DDHHD: Joshua Oppenheimer
F: Lars Skree
E: Niels Pagh Andersen
S: Henrik Gamov
P: Signe Byrge Sørensen
PE: Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, André Singer
CP: Final Cut for Real
The Danish Film Institute. Anne Marie Kurstein
T +45 3374 3573 E festivalkd@dfi.dk
W dfi.dk - thelookofsilence.com
Born in Texas, USA, in 1974, he studied at Harvard and London. He works as a researcher for the project Genocide and gender of the British AHRC, and directed the documentaries The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998), The Globalization Tapes (2003; with Christine Cynn) and The Act of Killing (2012; Bafici ‘13).
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
