Nominated for an Academy Award®, The Act of Killing is as dreamlike and terrifying as anything that Werner Herzog (an executive producer) could imagine. The film explores a horrifying era in Indonesian history and provides a window into modern Indonesia, where corruption reigns. Not only is the 1965 murder of an estimated one million people honored as a patriotic act, but the killers remain in power. In a mind-bending twist, death-squad leaders dramatize their brutal deeds in the style of the American westerns, musicals and gangster movies they love—and play both themselves and their victims. As their heroic facade crumbles, they come to question what they’ve done.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, the most-honored documentary of 2013 and winner of the 2014 BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, has its national broadcast premiere on Monday, Oct. 6, 2014 as a special broadcast on PBS’s POV (Point of View) series. (Check local listings.) It will stream on POV’s website www.pbs.org/pov/theactofkilling/ from Oct. 7 – Oct. 21, 2014. American television’s longest-running independent documentary series, POV is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.
When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo and his friends were small-time gangsters who controlled the black market in movie tickets while using the cinema as a base for more serious crimes. They hated the communists for boycotting American films–the most popular (and profitable) in the theaters.
The army recruited them to form death squads. Fashioning themselves and their methods after their Hollywood idols, they helped the army kill alleged communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals. Anwar borrowed a bloodless technique from mafia movies, strangling his victims with a piece of wire. It meant less cleaning up, as well as years of night terrors for the killer.
Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to acts of genocide.
But Indonesia has entered an era when children of the executed are beginning to speak out. “All this talk of human rights pisses me off,” says Anwar. “Everywhere in the world there are people like me.” Hence his need to make a movie to solidify the record of his group’s “patriotic struggle.”
It is in this movie-within-a-movie that the deepest drama of The Act of Killing unfolds. Desperate to convince themselves that what they did was right, the killers dramatize their crimes, from attacking entire villages to offering a victim one last cigarette before he dies. Anwar is waking to worsening nightmares, which are dramatized by costumed characters playing the ghosts of those he killed. He even has the crew make mannequins of himself as a dead man—murdered by his own victims.
When he plays the part of one of the people he tortured and strangled to death, he believes he can feel his victim’s terror and even sheds a tear. From behind the camera, director Joshua Oppenheimer points out, “What your victims felt was far worse, because they were dying, while you are only acting in a film.” Anwar seems to realize there is an unbridgeable abyss between the real meaning of what he’s done and the stories he and the entire Indonesian regime have told about the killings.
The Act of Killing raises many questions, but perhaps the most awful is this: If, as Anwar Congo says, there are people like him everywhere in the world, will we ever live without terror?
“There is no easy resolution to The Act of Killing,” says Oppenheimer. “I have developed a filmmaking method with which I have tried to understand why extreme violence, which we hope would be unimaginable, is not only imaginable, but routinely performed. We attempt to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in both the local and global human story, and to express the real costs of blindness, expedience and an inability to control greed and the hunger for power in an increasingly unified world society. This is not, finally, a story only about Indonesia. It is a story about us all.”