Previously ScandAsia told of Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Look of Silence’ being shortlisted together with 14 other films for the 2015 Academy Awards best documentary feature. The film has now made it through to the final five nominees for the best documentary feature. Another Danish film is also among the nominess this year. Tobias Lindholm’s ‘A War‘ is competing for the titel as best foreign language film.
‘A War‘ is about a Danish commandment man’s dilemma in the war in Afghanistan. The movie is produced by Nordic Films and premiered last year. It mixes professional actors with soldiers and has the Danish actor Pilou Asbæk in the leading role. ‘A War’ is Tobias Lindholm’s first Oscar nomination as a director, but he has previously supplied the script for ‘Jagten‘, which in 2014 was nominated in the same category without winning.
Produced in by Final Cut for Real in Denmark, The film is a sequel to Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary “The Act of Killing” which was nominated for the 2013 Oscars. Both movies are about the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. The killings followed a coup which took place in Jakarta on the morning of 1 October 1965. The Indonesian government was overthrown by the military and Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, founder of the nonaligned movement, and leader of the national revolution against Dutch colonialism, was deposed and replaced by rightwing General Suharto. After the coup, anybody opposed to the new military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist. In less than a year more than one million of the people opposed to the new military dictatorship were murdered.
The film follows an optician “Adi”, whos brother was brutally murdered in the 1965 purge of “communists”, identifying his brother’s killers and him subsequently struggling with whether he is able to forgive them. While checking their eyesight he asks them to take responsibility for their actions.
The final nominees was all announed on Thursday the 15th of January at a ceremony at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles.
