New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres

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And then, in Medan, in the capital of North Sumatra, the largest city in Sumatra, the third-largest city in Indonesia, a city of about the size perhaps of Chicago, the army recruited in 1965 its civilian death squad members from the ranks of movie theater gangsters, preman bioskop in Indonesian. These men were gangsters. They were part of a mafia that was running all sorts of criminal rackets, protection rackets, smuggling, illegal logging, prostitution rings, and so forth, but they were using as their base of operations movie theaters. And they were selling movie theater tickets on the black market as a kind of small side source of income. And they loved the movies. And because they were hanging out in them, so they developed a whole culture around the movies, whole kind of youth gang culture around the movies.

And at the time, the head of the American Motion Picture Association of Indonesia, a man named Bill Palmer, was believed by ordinary Indonesians to have been involved—been plotting a coup to overthrow the president of Indonesia, Sukarno. He was—he had a villa outside—the head of the American—the distributor of American movies in Indonesia had a villa outside of Jakarta in which they found a memorandum—which may or may not have been a forgery, we don’t know—planning—signed by the British ambassador, Gilchrist—again, could have been a forgery—but it was discovered, and it was a coup attempt against President Sukarno. So everybody had reason to think in Indonesia at the time that the head—the guy bringing American movies to Indonesia, Hollywood movies to Indonesia, was in fact a CIA officer and planning to overthrow their founding father, if you like. So there was a boycott, a wide-ranging, a wide—you know, a broad-based boycott of American movies in 1964, ’65.

And the movie theater gangsters hated this. So the army recruited them because they knew they had a proven capacity for violence, because they were criminals, gangsters, and they knew that they hated the Indonesian left already and could be easily mobilized to do their dirty work in attacking the left once the killing started. So the movie theater gangsters were recruited to form these death squads.

And as it happened, they loved—because of their love of movies, and because the army had placed the offices where they were killing people directly across the street from the cinema, so that it was convenient for them to leave the cinema, walk across the street and torture and kill people, they would torture and kill people in ways inspired by American movies. And the main character in the film, Anwar Congo, describes coming out of the movies, the midnight show—an Elvis Presley musical, for example—dancing his way across the street and killing happily. So, acting was always part of the act of killing for the men in the film. It was a way of distancing themselves from the horrific deeds they were doing.

And, of course, then, in my film, I have them—or I allow them to re-enact what they’ve done, to dramatize what they’ve done in whatever ways they wish. It’s worth, perhaps, in a moment, going into how I came to that method. But so, "the act of killing" has this double and even triple meaning, how acting was always part of the act of killing, how in the film they act out their memories of killing. And finally, it’s worth remembering that the act of killing needn’t be—needn’t refer simply to the act of killing human beings. It can—as it does in this case—as The Act of Killing demonstrates, I hope, as the film demonstrates, it also refers to the act of killing ideas, hope, community, solidarity, and sort of our common humanity.