About The Act of Killing
Joshua Oppenheimer asks the men who carried out the 1965 Indonesian death-squad killings to reenact the murders in any cinematic genre they like. They choose musical, gangster, and western, and along the way one of them finally understands what he did. One of the most ethically vertiginous documentaries ever made.
Released in 2012 and running a tight 2h 02m, The Act of Killing sits firmly in the documentary tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated NR and presented in Indonesian, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Joshua Oppenheimer belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. The Act of Killing is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Joshua Oppenheimer currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Anwar Congo, Herman Koto — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch The Act of Killing
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- San Francisco, CA — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Houston, TX — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Rochester, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Bethesda, MD — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Redwood City, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Pasadena, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Rensselaer, IN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Portland, OR — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Goleta, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Big Bear Lake, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Tempe, AZ — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. The Act of Killing is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 02m documentary work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Documentary genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.