A surreal account of slaughter

In 1965, the Indonesian military ousted Sukarno, the revolutionary leader who had ruled the country since independence. In order to consolidate their power, they massacred their opponents. Over half a million communist sympathisers and ethnic Chinese were murdered in the six months from October 1965 to March 1966.

Forty years later Josh Oppenheimer, an American graduate of Harvard’s filmmaking programme, flew to Sumatra, an epicentre of the slaughter, in order to make a documentary about the killings. He began by trying to find victims, but still afraid, few would talk to him. One of them suggested that he instead interview the perpetrators.  Rich and successful, they were not ashamed of their crimes and would be more willing to talk than the survivors.

After interviewing dozens of “premen”, local gangsters who had been deputised by the military to actually carry out the slaughter, Oppenheimer met Anwar Congo and realised he had found his star. When we first meet him, Congo seems a genial and dapper old man but in his youth, he led a gang that killed thousands.

Before the slaughter, Congo had been a scalper outside a movie theatre in Medan, the capital of Northern Sumatra. A big fan of Hollywood movies, one of the reasons he despised the communists is they tried to limit the number of American movies shown in Indonesia and this cost him money. In order to explore his memories of the massacres, Oppenheimer encourages Congo to recreate and film the killings in the style of the Hollywood films he loved.

The Act of Killing, filmed over six years from 2005 to 2011, is, in a way, the “behind the scenes” film of Anwar Congo’s kitsch version of the massacres. In Anwar Congo, Oppenheimer cast the perfect protagonist. Self-confident, brash, funny but inwardly still tortured by his crimes, Congo films himself singing “Born Free” surrounded by dancing girls, portrays himself as a victim being tortured while wearing bad horror movie make-up, and teaches us how best to garrotte a man, a method of murder he recommends as it doesn’t produce much blood.

This film is surreal. It opens with a stream of chorus girls exiting the mouth of a rusting statue of a large fish. We watch Herman Koto, Congo’s fat and thick sidekick wear a ball gown in order re-enact the rape of a Chinese girl, this time with himself playing the victim. We hear a self-satisfied paramilitary man bragging about the pleasures of raping 14-year-old girls while watching pyrotechnics on a film set. The film ends with its star revisiting the rooftop where he personally murdered dozens of men. He vomits, remembering his crimes.

I have never seen anything like The Act of Killing. Imagine if Steven Spielberg had allowed Amon Goeth (the SS commander played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) to recreate his experiences in the camp in the style of Leni Riefenstahl and filmed the making of that movie. This movie is a genre bender and will be fascinating to film buffs for its stylistic innovations.

More important, it reminds us slaughter most of us have forgotten. The killers in Indonesia profited from their crimes but this film tells us, under their braggadocio often lies pain. Killing people can’t be easy and psychologically, at least some of the killers pay a price. Perhaps the greatest compliment to this film is that when Oppenheimer showed it to Congo, the old gangster began to cry and said, “this is the film I expected. It’s an honest film, a true film.” The Act of Killing is the most original political documentary I have seen in ages.

“The Act of Killing” is on general release.