ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a film that has been considered one of the revelations in documentary cinema, The Act of Killing (or Jagal) by Joshua Oppenheimer. One of the most incredible and terrifying elements of this documentary is that it is the story of a genocide that has not been healed by any historical renewal, social reconciliation or by moral and ethical reparation for the victims’ families. Oppenheimer discovered the unknown genocide during the production of a series of documentaries about labour exploitation in Indonesia called The Globalization Tapes. The emotional incongruence of an unspeakable violence and its positive perception reflect the idea of genocide without real victims motivated by the fact that ‘the act of killing’ does not take on the semantic value people usually attribute to it. The ‘moral’ justification and rationalisation also applies to the fact that killing is not perceived as such and, on the contrary, it becomes lawful and an act of justice.
