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

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So, we talked about how we could do this safely, and one of the key survivors in the film said, "You know, why don’t you—why don’t you film more perpetrators? Because you’re finding out what happened, and in their boasting, the audience can see exactly why we’re so afraid, and also you can see the nature of this regime, what’s wrong with it, that these men could boast this way."

And so, I went back and started to realize, this is—it’s as though I am in Nazi Germany 40 years after the end of the Holocaust, and it’s still the Third Reich, the Nazis are still in power. So the official history says nothing about the killings. But, and yet, the aging SS officers have been allowed to boast about what they’ve done, even encouraged to do so, so that they’ve become these kind of feared proxies of the state in their communities, in their regions, and also perhaps that they can justify to themselves what they have done. And I realized at that point that this was a reality so grave, so important, that I would give it whatever it took of my life.

And I realized, I suppose, at that point, I knew that I would have to film every perpetrator I could find across the region, working my way up the chain of command, to the city of Medan and beyond, to retired army generals in Jakarta, to a retired State Department and CIA officer living outside of D.C. And I worked my way across the region. Every perpetrator I met was boastful. Every perpetrator I met was open. Within minutes of speaking to me, they would tell me these awful stories. Then typically they would invite me to the places where they killed. I always said, "Yes, take me," because I wanted to know what happened. I knew that we’re talking about the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people in one region. And these men, as they would forget—as they would grow old and die, the facts of what had happened would be lost.

So I felt entrusted by the survivors and the human rights community to film every single person I could find. Somewhere—Anwar, the main character in The Act of Killing, was the 41st killer I filmed. And somewhere around 10 or 15, my questions started to shift from "What happened back in 1965?" to "What’s going on now that these men can boast like this? Why are they boasting? For whom are they boasting? How do they want to be seen by the rest of the world? And how do they see themselves?"

AMY GOODMAN: Anwar Congo, it is said, has killed a thousand people.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yes, yes, that’s right. That’s what he’s—

AMY GOODMAN: With the piano wire or in all the different methods he used. Describe going out with him to the countryside.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: There’s two times we go to the countryside, actually. There’s one time where he re-enacts a killing which he thinks is the source of his nightmares. Of course, it’s not. He says he’s killed one person and failed to close the person’s eyes. He’s cut off a head, and the head stares at him. And he is in—starting to talk about his pain. It’s one of these conflicting moments, in that he’s, on the one hand, opening up about his pain and his trauma and his brokenness, at the same time as he’s still lying to himself about what he’s—about the source of his nightmares. He has killed a thousand people. He’s saying his nightmares come from this one killing.