TagJoshua Oppenheimer

What can we learn from the movie The Act of Killing about societies where mass murderers are celebrated as heroes?

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The Act of Killing examines the 1965 Indonesian coup d’état from the perspective of the perpetrators, who are hailed as heroes for the massacres they led in the name of anti-communism. The film sharply exposes the violence of social structures and power, and asks what lessons we can learn from it.   During the 1965 coup in Indonesia, the military secretly killed more than one million...