Sightlines · reception
How The Act of Killing was received
2012 · Joshua Oppenheimer · The Act of Killing on Sightlines
The arc
It landed at festivals in 2012 as an instant event — Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning, hailed as a documentary landmark — and a decade on it hasn't cooled: it's now a fixture near the top of greatest-documentaries-ever lists and a standard answer to 'what's the most disturbing film you've seen?'
What’s debated
The fight it still starts: is giving perpetrators a stage to perform their crimes a moral breakthrough or exploitation — a debate crystallized when BBC Storyville's Nick Fraser publicly attacked it while much of the doc world defended it as revelatory.
Its footprint
Werner Herzog's blurb — that he hadn't seen a film 'as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade' — became inseparable from the film, and its lurid musical-number imagery (the waterfall, the giant fish) is instantly recognizable shorthand for documentary surrealism.
Where it stands
A 'you must see it once' modern canon entry — routinely ranked among the greatest documentaries of the century and inevitably paired with its companion piece, The Look of Silence.
Did you know? Because of the danger of reprisals in Indonesia, dozens of the film's local crew — including one of its co-directors — are credited simply as 'Anonymous' in the end titles.
Named by the director
- Jean Rouch — Oppenheimer has repeatedly cited Rouch's ethnofiction method — participants performing versions of themselves for the camera — as a key inspiration for the film's approach.
- Dušan Makavejev — Oppenheimer studied under Makavejev at Harvard and has credited him with shaping his taste for political surrealism and rule-breaking nonfiction.