Conceived as a companion piece to 2012’s The Act Of Killing, this picks up where Joshua Oppenheimer’s doc on the ’60’s Genocide under an anti-communist regime closed. The metaphor of the Interviewer being a door-to-door Optician isn’t lost, as he goes about asking the surviving members of the regime whether they regret the part they played in the Genocide and the murder of his older Brother with his last strains of hope spiralling away.
Admittedly, it’s not a barrel of chuckles but the grotesque truths being put to the screen in such fashion and so heart-on-sleeve really can’t be put to task for being depressing, bone-chilling or indeed stomach churning….though they undoubtedly are.
Traversing the psychological landscape of torture and murder in the name of “Politics” is draining but it’s an important film that begs to be viewed and when the protagonist says at one point: ” I think You are avoiding Moral Responsibility” to one of the many “Elected” officials caught on film, you don’t for one second think it’s grandstanding, the threat is hinted at, real and still there.
This is cinema at it’s most honest, raw, important, powerful,profoundly beautiful but above all else…….harrowing, harrowing stuff.
5/5
