Cebu Film Fest Shows Historic Flick

Film-fanatics in Cebu were treated to a series of documentary flicks in the recent Second International Documentary Film Festival, which ran from August 21-24.

Highlighting the event was the Philippine debut Film Screening on the Closing Night and Awarding Ceremony, which featured an award-winning documentary film entitled “The Act of  Killing”, a story of the years of Indonesian genocide, suffering, and repression of one of its most lethal and efficient killers, Anwar Congo.

The film was shown at the Cebu Cultural Center in Lahug last August 24. “The Act of Killing” is directed by American Joshua Oppenheimer and executive-produced by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. It won awards like Berlinale Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary 2013, Berlinale Panorama Prize of the Ecumenical Jury 2013, 2013 Danish Academy Award for Best Documentary (Robert Award), and 2013 Special Prize of the Danish Film Critics Association – Bodil Awards (Sær Bodil), among others.

As a background, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military, Anwar in 1965 and his ragtag group of friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie-theater tickets on the black market to death-squad leaders. Fueled by alcohol, ecstasy, and whatever other mind-altering substances they could find, Anwar’s gang helped the army kill more than 1 million alleged Communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year.

Oppenheimer documents an elderly, demon-infested Anwar, as he and his old friends re-enact their brutally callous murders. Recalling a real-life Ben from the 1992 mockumentary Man Bites Dog, Anwar is a simultaneously charismatic, wounded, and terrifying subject. The Act Of Killing opened July 19 in limited release

The Second International Documentary Film Festival was spearheaded by the Cebu International Documentary Film Festival (CIDFF), a non-stock, non-profit organization which objective includes the spreading of awareness on the growing art of documentary film as an art, as an advocacy and a passion. It identifies Documentary Film as an instrument of telling narratives, highlighting stories and shedding light to issues and realities of the times or of the past.

The theme of the concluded festival was, “Let Your Passion Lead The Change” where it aimed to introduce and immerse students and film enthusiasts to the world of film making and highlight its inherent value towards the society.

Students, professors and chairpersons from selected universities and organizations as well as other film-enthusiasts were invited in the event. The film festival was free of entrance.