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

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AMY GOODMAN: In the film, The Act of Killing, it ends in a devastating way. Can you talk a little about what happens?

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, at the end of the film, I think that Anwar is not able to say the same kinds of things he’s saying throughout the whole film. He’s speaking the same kind of lines. He takes us back to that office, where we were at the beginning of the film, the first time I met him, where he shows how he killed and then danced the cha cha cha. He takes us back there. And it’s the first time we’ve gone back, indeed the first time I went back, in over the course of five years of shooting 1,200 hours of material. We go back to that office, and my intention was just to ask him to say what happened in that office. And he’s speaking very much the same words that he has at the beginning of the film. But his body, it’s as though his body physically is rebelling against the line that he’s been speaking. He can no longer utter these words and not—and not—and bear it. His body starts—he starts to retch. And it’s as though, I think, he’s trying to vomit up the ghosts that haunt him, only to find that he is the ghost, in the sense that he is what—his past haunts him, and he is his past, and he’ll never be free of it. And so nothing comes up. He has lost all of his swagger.

And in a way, it’s an enduring metaphor for how the film has come to Indonesia, in the sense that there’s an official—they’re still—in school, they’re still teaching that the communists were—they’re still teaching in school that the victims of the genocide deserved what they got, that it was all—they’re teaching that the genocide was justified and talking about it as a kind of heroic chapter in the nation’s history, without going into the details of the killing. But Indonesians themselves are starting to recognize that this is, like Anwar’s words at the end, a kind of hollow line, because the act of killing is making such a difference there.

AMY GOODMAN: You have shown this film in Indonesia?

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. Indonesia has political film censors. They still censor films and books that deal with human rights violations. They ban them. We knew that if we just submitted the film to the censors before there was Indonesian support for the film, that it would be banned. If it’s banned, we knew—if it were banned, we knew that that would be an excuse for the paramilitary groups in Indonesia or for the army to physically attack screenings with impunity, because it becomes a crime to screen the film at all.

So, to get around that, all last autumn, we held screenings at the National Human Rights Commission in Jakarta for Indonesia’s leading news producers, news publishers, news journalists, filmmakers, human rights advocates, survivors’ groups, historians, educators, writers, artists. Everybody really embraced the film—you could even say loved the film—said we have to show this film, we have to get this film out.

The news editors did—and publishers, did perhaps the most interesting thing. If you imagine you’re the editor of Indonesia’s biggest news magazine, a magazine called Tempo, you’re very much part of the establishment. And you’re in your late middle age, and you see this movie where the founding fathers of that establishment, of your regime, are totally broken by the end of the film. The main character is tormented and ravaged. The side characters are hollow empty shells of human beings. And you’re faced with a pretty stark choice. They’re not enjoying—these men are not enjoying their old age as the heroes they’ve been telling themselves and the rest of the country that they are. They’re destroyed. You’re faced with a stark choice, if you’re the editor of Indonesia’s biggest news magazine: Do you want to grow old as a perpetrator, or do you want to take a stance?