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

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AMY GOODMAN: Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. He spent more than eight years interviewing Indonesian death squad leaders, and in his new film, The Act of Killing, he works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies the men love to watch. This includes classic Hollywood gangster movies and lavish musical numbers. The Act of Killing opens today in New York City at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema and then moves on to Los Angeles and Washington and the rest of the country. We’ll continue our interview in a moment.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with my interview with the director of a groundbreaking new documentary called The Act of Killing. The film is about Indonesia, where, beginning in 1965, the U.S.-backed military and paramilitary slaughtered up to a million Indonesians after overthrowing the government. A key figure in the film, Anwar Congo, who killed hundreds, if not a thousand, people with his own hands, now revered as a founding father of an active right-wing paramilitary. Director Joshua Oppenheimer spent more than eight years interviewing Indonesian death squad leaders; in The Act of Killing, works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies. Let’s go back to the interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, but first a scene from The Act of Killing.

ANWAR CONGO: [translated] There’s many ghosts here, because many people were killed here. They died unnatural deaths. Unnatural deaths. They arrived perfectly healthy. When they got here, they were beaten up, and died. At first, we beat them to death. But there was too much blood. There was so much blood here. So when we cleaned it up, it smelled awful. To avoid the blood, I used this system. Can I show you?

Sit there. Face that way. We have to re-enact this properly. This is how to do it without too much blood.

I’ve tried to forget all this, with good music, dancing, feeling happy, a little alcohol, a little marijuana, a little—what do you call it? Ecstasy? Once I’d get drunk, I’d fly and feel happy.

AMY GOODMAN: Anwar Congo describing the act of killing. Joshua Oppenheimer, you’re the director. Take it from there.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: This was in fact the very first day that I met Anwar or filmed Anwar. And it was typical, in a way. As I was saying earlier, I began this process in the countryside outside of the city of Medan working with survivors. They would send me to meet perpetrators. The perpetrators would boast. When we would go back and film with the survivors, however, the military would come and stop us. The army and the police would come and stop us. They would detain us. They would take our equipment. They would take our tapes. And it was very difficult to get anything done, and it was terrifying for the survivors themselves.

So we regrouped. We went to Jakarta as a group with the survivors with whom we were filming, met the broader Indonesian human rights community and asked, "Is this too soon, after the fall of the Suharto dictatorship, for us to make this film? Is it still too sensitive?" We showed what we had filmed with the perpetrators. We asked, "Is it too dangerous?" Everybody said, "No, you must continue. We need—you’re on to something terribly important, and we need a film that exposes, for Indonesians themselves—above all, for Indonesians themselves—the nature of the regime in which they’re living, things that they already know but have been too afraid to say. Essentially, we need a film that comes to Indonesia, like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, pointing to things we know are true but are too afraid to articulate, so that we can now articulate them without fear."