The Act of Killing - Documentary/Movie

Although I find that the way the main characters were misled by the producer was ethically questionable,  I did enjoyed the film. The film provides interesting insights into the minds of persons who are capable of mass murders/executions. The most important factor is that these murderers are convinced that their acts of killing is for the right reasons. There's also empowerment. They believe that what they do is sanctioned by higher authorities so that they are absolved of any guilt or remorse.

Bear in mind that these people are gangsters and violent people to begin with. Somehow, through a perverted turn in history, these people were tasked with the patriotic duty of rooting out and exterminating the communists. They were the Suharto's government's death squad during 1965-66. It was estimated that 500k to 1 million people were killed, among them were communists, farmers and ethnic Chinese. Men, women, children, nobody were spared. (More info Here). Although the ethnic Chinese were not the sole target during that period, they were however, specifically targeted in the 1998 riots. (More info HERE)

This film has generated quite a number of interests in China, where some Chinese learned about it for the first time. It also received mixed reactions both in Indonesian as well as China. More news HERE and HERE.

After watching this film, it really makes me wonder whether the people in Malaysia have taken peace & harmony for granted. It also brings me to question the wisdom of those who are fond of threatening others and also those who insists on provoking the former.

Anyway, looking at Anwar Congo & his friends today with families of their own, you wouldn't have guessed that they were part of a group of mass murderers who collectively were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. In the film, they nonchalantly re-enact the techniques they employed in the murders. There's even a scene where they went about extorting money from Chinese shop owners (not re-enactment but was recorded live as it was happening). It's as if extortion is legal over there.

They were used, first by the politicians in the 1960s, and again by the producer of this film. Perhaps it's karma, which ironically Anwar Congo did talk about in one of the scenes. He also talks about his nightmares.

Overall, an interesting film worth watching.

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Synopsis (from IMDB)

Anwar Congo and his friends have been dancing their way through musical numbers, twisting arms in film noir gangster scenes, and galloping across prairies as yodelling cowboys. Their foray into filmmaking is being celebrated in the media and debated on television, because Anwar Congo and his friends are mass murderers.

MEDAN, INDONESIA When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands. 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.

THE ACT OF KILLING is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike ageing Nazis or Rwandan genocidaires, Anwar and his friends have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries. THE ACT OF KILLING is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. And THE ACT OF KILLING is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.

A LOVE OF CINEMA In their youth, Anwar and his friends spent their lives at the movies, for they were "movie theatre gangsters": they controlled a black market in tickets, while using the cinema as a base of operations for more serious crimes. In 1965, the army recruited them to form death squads because they had a proven capacity for violence, and they hated the communists for boycotting American films - the most popular (and profitable) in the cinemas. Anwar and his friends were devoted fans of James Dean, John Wayne, and Victor Mature. They explicitly fashioned themselves and their methods of murder after their Hollywood idols. And coming out of the midnight show, they felt "just like gangsters who stepped off the screen". In this heady mood, they strolled across the boulevard to their office and killed their nightly quota of prisoners. Borrowing his technique from a mafia movie, Anwar preferred to strangle his victims with wire.

In THE ACT OF KILLING, Anwar and his friends agree to tell the filmmakers the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. The filmmakers seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history.

And so the filmmakers challenge Anwar and his friends to develop fiction scenes about their experience of the killings, adapted to their favorite film genres - gangster, western, musical. They write the scripts. They play themselves. And they play their victims. Their fiction filmmaking process provides the film's dramatic arc, and their film sets become safe spaces to challenge them about what they did. Some of Anwar's friends realize that the killings were wrong. Others worry about the consequence of the story on their public image. Younger members of the paramilitary movement argue that they should boast about the horror of the massacres, because its terrifying and threatening force is the basis of their power today. As opinions diverge, the atmosphere on set grows tense. The edifice of genocide as a "patriotic struggle", with Anwar and his friends as its heroes, begins to sway and crack.

Most dramatically, the filmmaking process catalyzes an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar, from arrogance to regret as he confronts, for the first time in his life, the full terror of what he's done. As Anwar's fragile conscience is threatened by the pressure to remain a hero, THE ACT OF KILLING presents a gripping conflict between moral imagination and moral catastrophe.