joshua oppenheimer

The End

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Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Son (George MacKay)

Here’s a pitch. A film about an oligarch family living in a bunker for 25 years… done as a musical! The End is Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his two documentaries about the genocidal regime in Indonesia, and should at least win awards for audacious change of direction. Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence both marked him out as a special talent, but those were both now ten-plus years ago and in the decade since he’s directed a couple of episodes of TV and nothing else. The End is both a return to film-making as well as a shift into fiction. According to the man himself, what he wanted to do … Read more

The Act of Killing

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Former executioner Anwar Congo

“For killing people trousers should be thick,” says Anwar, the “star” and chief exhibit in this bizarre documentary. He’s the retired head executioner of an Indonesian death squad reliving his glory days garrotting hundreds if not thousands of “communists” (ie anyone in the way) with a piece of thick wire in the mid 1960s. And though now knocking on a bit he shows us how he did it, in the place he did it, a cement yard out the back of what looks like a restaurant. Bizarre though this is, there is more to come, because what the makers of this film have done – not sure if it was their idea or … Read more