Saturday, May 31, 2014

Monthly Film Screening, Cinema of Resistance (Kolkata), 1st June @ 5 pm

Monthly Film Screening, Cinema of Resistance (Kolkata), 1st June @ 5 pm

Cinema of Resistance (Kolkata) & People's Film Collective welcomes you to its

3RD MONTHLY FILM SCREENING & DISCUSSION

_____________________

Sunday, 1st June 2014, Time: 5 pm to 8 pm
The Act of Killing

Genre: Documentary
 
Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer/122 minutes/Documentary/2013/English subs.
Venue: Near Patuli PS, EM Bypass.
Entry: Free and Open to All, on a First-come-first-seated Basis


NB. Please respond at cor.kolkata@gmail.com or send an SMS to 9163736863 or 8902550931 to confirm that you would be coming. This is an indoor screening and so there is only limited space


_____________________

Synopsis:

When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.

Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to acts of genocide.

The Act of Killing is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike ageing Nazis or Rwandan génocidaires, Anwar and his friends have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries. The Act of Killing is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. And The Act of Killing is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.

The film won the 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards.

The Act of Killing won best documentary at the 2014 BAFTA awards. In accepting the award, Oppenheimer asserted that the United States and the United Kingdom have “collective responsibility” for “participating in and ignoring” the crimes, which was omitted from the video BAFTA posted online. After a screening for US Congress members, Oppenheimer demanded that the US acknowledge its role in the killings.

TRAILERhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD5oMxbMcHM

No comments:

Post a Comment