![]() Premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in October 2012, “The Act of Killing” took the Panorama Audience Award and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the recent 2013 Berlin International Film Festival but there have been no official screenings in the country where it took place. It’s easier that way and less blood to clean.” “And then pull it, sometimes with a pole. “I choke them to death, with steel wire around the neck,” Congo says in the film, demonstrating in front of the camera how it was done. The main character in the film, Anwar Congo, was the one of the most feared death squad leaders in the area around the city of Medan in Sumatra. Estimates put as many as one million people dead in a wave of violence after the aborted coup and purge of communists and alleged sympathizers. These death squads were operating systematically across Indonesia mostly in the late 1960s. The film, which runs for nearly two hours and won two prizes at this month’s Berlin International Film Festival, re-enacts several murders and features a member of a death squad. I realized, my goodness, how is it possible that the perpetrators of mass murder should talk loudly and boastfully and with smiles and laughter.” “That was for me the beginning of the journey. encountered the boastful and shocking way that the killers were talking about what they did,” said Oppenheimer in a telephone interview from Denmark. He took their advice and was horrified by his findings. Most were too afraid to appear on camera to speak with him and suggested he talk to the killers. Oppenheimer came up with the idea for the film while working on a different project in North Sumatra and found many relatives of the Indonesians he was talking to had been killed or imprisoned between 19 for trying to form a union. The subject is still so sensitive it is rarely broached in public.īut now a documentary, “The Act of Killing,” made by Texan-born director Joshua Oppenheimer, shines a light on that dark era, focusing on the death squads and torture that seem like a myth to the majority of the Indonesian population. REUTERS/BeawihartaĪ communist-led coup attempt had just failed, triggering a wave of arrests and killings that ushered in more than three decades of rigid anticommunist education and propaganda. The opening of "The Act of Killing", a documentary made by Texan-born director Joshua Oppenheimer, is pictured during an underground screening at a theatre in Jakarta February 6, 2013. ![]()
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