One of my colleagues screened The Act of Killing at SXSW this past March and tried his best to share the experience with me; of course, no matter how he tried, I just didn’t understand what he was trying to share with me. This is not due to his inability to explain the documentary, but rather, the documentary itself is not the type of doc we’ve ever seen. The Act of Killing, focused on the Indonesian massacre during the late ’60s, took an experimental direction in its explanation of the near-genocide. The filmmakers not only interviewed some of the surviving murderers, deemed heroes by their country; they made them re-enact their memories of killing and stylized each re-enactment in a Hollywood-style short.

What results is this meshing of fictionalized acts of violence fueled by true memories of murder, death, and killing. In the process, the filmmakers analyze the psychology of the killers in hopes of understanding their psychology and guilt decades after they committed such heinous acts. The Act of Killing, just based on this trailer below, shifts the documentary form into a haunting examination of real-life killers. With the help of both Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss) and Errol Morris (Tabloid) signing on as executive producers after screening the documentary, The Act of Killing will have a limited theatrical release on July 19th.