Acting Facts tells a story of a massacre that resulted in the deaths of several hundred unarmed civilians, murdered by American soldiers on the morning of 16 March 1968 in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. When the news of this bloodbath finally came out late in 1969, it caused widespread incredulity and shock. This was the first report of a war crime that had been committed by American soldiers, and even those who were violently opposed to the war in Vietnam would have never thought such an atrocity possible. In 1970, the events at My Lai were officially investigated by the Peers Panel and the findings were widely publicised and discussed. At home, the support for military action in Vietnam began to waver.

The text of Acting Facts is composed of different testimonies presented before the Peers Panel; it is an account of what happened in My Lai drawn from the public recollections of eye-witnesses and perpetrators. These memories are mediated through an actor who at times recites the text, but who also falls into acting it out, taking on the different personae – the bullying officer, or the grenadier who straightens up when addressing his superior. (…)

For Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger, theatre is not about enacting fantasies, but about the investigation of information transfer. They use theatrical form and its mediation in film as an approach to furthering knowledge about communication and about cognition. Their films concentrate on the performative aspects of introspection (…).

Moser / Schwinger work with non-narrative narratives; their films do not present a full story, they do not elaborate a linear development of one theme, but are rather elliptical and at times also decontextualised. Acting Facts therefore cannot only be seen as a film about Vietnam or about My Lai, as these places are never even mentioned in the spoken text, but as a pathology of armed conflict, as a study in dehumanisation and the methods of coming to terms with it. (Review by Axel Lapp)