"We depend on other people's suffering for our every day lives because in most places, I would say, people who commit atrocities are not punished and become the powerful men in their societies"...  Fascinating interview with filmmaker Oppenheimer on his new documentary film, The Act of Killing.

In January 2013 I flew to Manta, the largest fishing port in Ecuador, to attend the second annual Festival Ecuador Bajo Tierra. As its title suggests, it is a festival for Ecuadorian underground films, held in conjunction with the first-ever Ronda de Negocios de DVD, a place to discuss the distribution and commercialisation of national low-budget films. (1) In attendance were producers, directors, distributors, DVD manufacturers, a graphic designer, a post-production company, the hardest working actor in Ecuador today, the president of the National Film Council (the biggest source of film-financing in the country, with $730,000 destined for 2013), ministers of culture, and sub-ministers and their employees. In other words, a diverse selection of the Ecuadorian film world met for the first time to express their concerns, expectations and disappointments, and perhaps to begin future collaborations. The elephant in the room, of course, was the very contradiction of the entire event: the formality of what has otherwise been a largely informal industry. Manta, a working-class city far from the political and economic centres of Quito and Guayaquil, respectively, was the perfect setting for such an unlikely historical event.