Cinema Atlas Connection

I watched Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. It’s a very unusual film. Joshua had this idea for a documentary where he tracked down the perpetrators of Indonesian death squads and asked them to re-enact their crimes... But it gives you a sense of the kind of power that some sort of re-enactment or fictionalization can have when you’re dealing with things where you can’t fully be journalistic or you can’t fully bring things to life in a way that gives people a true sense of them.

Films like 'Kagemusha' or 'Ran' deal with massive historical canvas, and yet tell a very intimate story at their heart, and are hugely influential.