10 Best Documentary Movies Of The Last Decade

When director Joshua Oppenheimer set out to Indonesia in the early 2000s to make a film about the survivors of the mass killings that took place between 1965 and 1966, his investigation led him to interviewing the very men responsible for the killings. He found that they were more than happy to discuss their crimes, and the result was The Act Of Killing, a powerful and visceral piece of filmmaking that confronts viewers with the horrors of violence.

Featuring sequences in which former kill squad members gleefully reminisce about the methods they used to kill, with one notorious sequence seeing an executioner re-enact his method for garrotting his victims, Oppenheimer's documentary doesn't shy away from the grisly details. A lot of what’s shown is truly disturbing and reinforces the extent of how heinous these actions were. But there’s more to this film than shock factor alone.

The filmmaker also injects a sense of surrealism into his film. In one scene, for example, the same man watches his own recreation back while commenting on how accurate it is in the presence of children. It's a disturbingly strange scene, but one that nevertheless underscores how fidgetingly warped this whole situation is.