"The Act of Murder" opens the Human Rights Film Festival

"The Act of Killing" by director Joshua Oppenheimer, a Danish-Norwegian-British production, opens this year's edition of the Human Rights Film Festival "Ubrzaj". It is a documentary film that pushed the boundaries of documentary filmmaking and is already considered by many to be primordial art, even though it is at the beginning of its life.

Communist regime replaced. Introduced "democracy". Formed death squads that kill and mass-massacre all those who keep communist values, who are even slightly different. A campaign of intimidation and idolatry against the fathers of the homeland. Unrecognized genocide and unprocessed crimes against humanity. In the end, the killers were declared and celebrated as heroes. This is the basis for the development of the plot of the film The Act of Killing by the author Joshua Oppenheimer, who spent ten years in Indonesia working on the story of the death squads that ran rampant during and after the coup of General Suharto. The result is a shocking and disturbing film in which the actors are criminals and history makers who, through their imagination, talk about the events during '65-'66 in which they were participants. You are guided through the film by Anvar, a national hero - a former perpetrator of the genocide of a million people, who is challenged to dramatize his memories of the massacres. "War crimes are defined by the victors. I'm a winner, so I can make my own definition," Anwar claims in the film.

Conversations with the victims, whom Oppenheimer met secretly so that their lives would not be endangered, remained in the shadow of the state of consciousness in which Anwar described the crimes, even faithfully depicting the ways in which he tortured communists, members of the Chinese ethnic group and dissenters. According to the director, the goal of the film was "to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in Indonesian and global human history. We wanted to express how much blindness, cunning, and the inability to control greed and hunger for power in a growing and divided society really cost us". In this way, the director has developed a story that tries to explain how this extreme violence becomes routine and leads to a huge number of senseless deaths and the even more inconceivable rise of killers. Because, unlike the wars in the SFRY and the processes that took place in Rwanda and Germany, where war criminals were as much as brought to justice before the court in The Hague and Nuremberg, and where the processes are also conducted at the national level, the Indonesian criminals were not prosecuted but were became celebrated faces. There were no trials and the victims were ridiculed, the perpetrators of the crimes are in ministerial posts and create a society that will celebrate them as heroes, and their main means of ruling is intimidation.

The film The Killing Act is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity where killers joke about crimes against humanity on TV shows and celebrate moral catastrophe with the ease and elegance of a dance floor. However, as such, this film leads us to an understanding of the horrors that man is capable of committing and leaves no one indifferent.

The film has won over 30 of the most prestigious awards, among which certainly the most important for now is the 2013 European Film Academy Awards - the award for the best European documentary in 2013, and there are, among others, awards for the Best European Documentary 2013 Berlin Film Festival - Panorama Audience Award / (2013 Panorama Audience Award), 2013 Berlin Film Festival - Prize of the Ecumenical Jury / (2013 Award of the Ecumenical Jury), 2013 Istanbul- Prize of the SIYAD jury (Turkish Film Critics' Association) / (2013 Award of the Association of Turkish Film Critics ).

The Human Rights Film Festival Ubrzaj, the first and only of its kind in Montenegro, aims to contribute to raising the awareness of citizens about the importance of human rights and their protection and improvement, as well as the value framework that encourages harmonious relations between different on what basis. It is organized by the Center for Civic Education (CGO) in cooperation with the Montenegrin National Theater and Beldocs, with the support of the Canadian Embassy, ​​and the media patronage of RTCG and Vijesti.

The film The Act of Murder will be shown at the opening of the Festival on Tuesday at 20 p.m., in the Montenegrin National Theater, and the audience will have the opportunity to hear the author's address via video link.

The complete program of the Festival is available at www.ubrzaj.me and admission to all screenings is free.