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

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AMY GOODMAN: In that scene, when they say, "Cut! Cut!" because they’re also directing the scene—they’re in it, and they’re directing it, like a movie. One of the little girls keeps crying.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the response to her by one of the killers.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Well, it’s actually—the girl who’s crying is Herman, Anwar’s sidekick and sort of one of the three main characters in the film, his daughter. And she—all of the children in the film have been auditioned for their ability to cry. And they’re not actually children of victims; they’re playing children of victims. She cries. Herman does his best to comfort her. He has a very wonderful line where he says, "Movie stars normally only cry for a second, so pull yourself together. You’re embarrassing your father."

But, in a way, I think that her—the child—the children’s crying is not what’s—it’s always disturbing to see children cry in film, but that’s probably not the most disturbing thing. There’s another woman there who’s the wife of a high-ranking paramilitary leader, who is, on a—in another moment in the film, her husband is saying, "God hates the communists," on television. She looks like she’s fainted. And an Indonesian viewer will say she’s kesurupan, or possessed. And they’re trying to kind of purge the ghost, so they’re trying to exorcise the ghosts that possess her. Whether we believe in possession and ghosts or not, what’s clear is that she is old enough to have experiences of this, even though she’s married to a high-ranking perpetrator. Some real memory or real trauma comes up through the process.

And I think it speaks to—it speaks really to something at the core of the film, which is that no matter how much, as a filmmaker, as an artist, I tried to stay in control of what was happening and control the experience that was unfolding in the shooting and also in the edited film, I think we were all—all of us were overwhelmed. It was like a tsunami overtaking us. And I think, in hindsight, you cannot walk into a place where a million people have been killed, where the perpetrators are still in power and are boasting about it and keeping everybody afraid, and then, it turns out, are doing that as much to protect their own conscience, so they can live with themselves, as to keep everybody else down—you cannot do that and not—and address such a situation honestly and not be overwhelmed.

AMY GOODMAN: Joshua Oppenheimer, talking about his new film, The Act of Killing. 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 Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the new film, opening tonight, The Act of Killing.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: The premise of the film is that Anwar and his friends are able to re-enact what they’ve done in whatever ways they wished. As I was filming perpetrator after perpetrator, they would take me to the places where they killed. They would offer to show me—want to show me how they killed. And gradually, I started asking them, "Look, you’ve"—or saying to them, very openly, "You’ve participated in one of the biggest killings in human history. Your whole society is based on it. Your lives are shaped by it. You want to show me what you’ve done. I want to understand what it means to you and to your society. So go ahead and show me what you’ve done, in whatever way you wish. I’ll film the process. I’ll film your re-enactments. And we’ll combine this material to show what these events mean to you and your society."