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

Continued from previous page

And at some point, starting with—and I think I actually suspected that I would combine all of these different perpetrators from across the region, but I lingered on this one main character, Anwar Congo, because his pain was close to the surface, his memories were present, the past was with us as he would re-enact, and it was haunting. So, and he was a movie theater gangster, so he started to propose—he had this love of American movies. He started to propose these more and more complicated re-enactments that were inspired by the genres of his favorite movies, Hollywood movies from the ’50s and ’60s.

And he would invite in—I think to—he would watch his re-enactments, and he would always look pained. And then he would—but he wouldn’t express what was wrong. He would never say, "This is awful because it makes me look bad." The pain that he would—that would be all over his face when he would watch his re-enactments, he would not dare articulate, because to do so would be to admit what he did was wrong. And he’s never been forced to do so. He’s never been forced to admit what he did was wrong. Normally, in documentaries about perpetrators, perpetrators deny what they’ve done, or they apologize, act apologetic about it, at least. And that’s because by the time we speak to them, they’ve been approached as perpetrators, they’ve been removed from power, they’ve been framed as people who have done something wrong, so they deny or they apologize. These men are still in power.

So, Anwar watching his re-enactments would look disturbed, and instead of saying why he’s disturbed, he would take that emotion and place it into something trivial, like "My clothes are wrong. My hair—I need to dye my hair. My acting isn’t good." So, he started to embellish the scenes and create these more and more surreal, more and more strange re-enactments, which I filmed because I understood they were allegories for a whole system of impunity—what happens to us collectively as individuals when we kill, when we have an original crime, we get away with it, we justify it, and therefore we cling to that justification, we persecute the survivors, lest they should challenge our version of the events. So, Anwar starts to embellish, and the motor, if you like, for these embellishments is his conscience.

And he brings in another death squad member, another member of his death squad named Adi. And the re-enactments get more and more emotional, more and more intense. And in the next clip, in the clip we’ll see here, it’s a moment where they’ve just re-enacted the torture and killing that happened in their office, downstairs from where Anwar does the cha cha cha earlier in the—in the earlier clip we saw. They re-enact the torture and killing in this office, and afterwards, they respond to it. And the other member of Anwar’s death squad, Adi, recognizes, wait a minute, this method, these re-enactments have the power to turn the entire official history on its head.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us who’s speaking first.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: So it’s Adi. The character we’ll see speaking here is named Adi. He is the other surviving member of Anwar’s very elite death squad.

AMY GOODMAN: And he has flown in to do this film that you are filming.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, he flew in midway through the process. I was trying to meet him from the very beginning, after meeting Anwar, but Anwar kept him away from me. Anwar wouldn’t introduce me to him. His full name in Indonesian is Adi. There’s thousands and thousands of Adis in Jakarta. It was impossible to find him without Anwar’s help. Anwar only introduced us to him once Anwar was confident that he was indeed the star of The Act of Killing. So, at this point, midway, somewhere in the middle of the film, Adi has finally flown in from Jakarta, reunited with his old friend and former killing colleague, and they’re on the set, having just re-enacted the torture and killing that they did together in their youth.