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AWARDS Denmark / UK

The Act of Killing is nominated for two BAFTAS

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- Shortlisted for the Oscar, US director Joshua Oppenheimer’s Danish documentary has won more than 40 international awards, including the US critics’ annual prize – now he is preparing the sequel

The Act of Killing is nominated for two BAFTAS

Less than two weeks before the 2014 Oscar nominations are announced (January 16), Copenhagen-based American director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing [+see also:
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– which has been shortlisted in the Best Documentary category –was nominated for two BAFTAs, the UK’s top film prize, for Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. The awards will be announced at a February 16 ceremony in London.

Last week (January 4), Oppenheimer’s third film, which the European Film Academy named Best European Documentary 2013, received the award for Best Non-Fiction Film from the US National Society of Film Critics (in a tie with US veteran director Frederick Wiseman’s At Berkeley, which also got 20 votes).

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Executive produced by, ao, German director-producer Werner Herzog (who said that during at least a decade, he had not seen a film “as powerful, surreal, and frightening”), The Act of Killing deals with the killing of more than one million Indonesians deemed as Communists after the 1965 military coup.

Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian director examine a country with a regime of corruption, where former death squadron leaders are celebrated as heroes, challenging them to re-enact their real-life mass killings in the style of the American movies they love.

Meanwhile Oppenheimer and his crew are working on The Look of Silence, the sequel of The Act of Killing, which is scheduled for a September premiere. The film was shot before the The Act of Killing, for the safety of the people who appear in it, according to Danish producer Signe Byrge Sørensen, of Final Cut for Real Productions.

“It was always the intention to make two films,” Oppenheimer told Danish film magazine Ekko. “Part 2 follows a family of survivors, who find out who killed their son; his younger brother decides to break the silence they have lived with, and faces the people who were involved in the murder.”

“In Indonesia it is unthinkable that a survivor seeks out the perpetrator, so the brother violates one taboo after the other – he is met with fear, anger and threats,” concluded the director, who characterised The Look of Silence as “a lyrical elegy to this silence, but also as a poem about breaking it and the trauma it represents.”

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