‘the act of killing’: an entry at the toronto international film festival 2012, is an inventive documentary by british filmmaker joshua oppenheimer about a group of ex-movie theatre gangsters who were employed by the indonesian military in the 1965 coup, to kill alleged communists and ethnic chinese.

now leaders of a right-wing paramilitary organization, they were challenged by the filmmaker to reenact their murders in their own choosing of favourite james dean, john wayne, and hollywood characters. the brilliantly subversive film-within-a-film criterion has werner herzog and errol morris credited as executive producers.