'The Act of Killing' director speaks at IU Cinema

When the Indonesian government was overthrown by its military in 1965, inconsequential gangsters turned into death squad leaders. They assisted the military in killing more than one million people in a single year.

Congo Anwar, the main character of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary film “The Act of Killing,” was one of the perpetrators.

Oppenheimer spoke at the IU Cinema Thursday afternoon.

“The film was meant to be kind of an antidote to the fear that underpins a present day moral and cultural vacuum built by the killers and it still remains in the present,”
Oppenheimer said. “That was our guiding ambition, but I never expected it to succeed.”

The film won a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary and was most recently nominated for a 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Brandon Walsh, the former Director of Film for Union Board, organized Oppenheimer’s visit, which consisted of a lecture, film screening and Q&A session.

Walsh led the lecture, during which Oppenheimer discussed how he developed the idea for the film, problems he faced in Indonesia and what the film has done for the
country.

“Whatever the film has done is partial and I don’t think a single film can transform much in the world,” he said, “but I think that the film is such an apocalyptic vision that a big part of me in making it has to be a pessimist or I couldn’t create something so dark.”

Oppenheimer showed video clips of the killers reenacting how they treated the victims of the murders.

He said once he began filming them, there was no end to the number willing to boast about what they had done. Torture was being celebrated.

“I was afraid to approach the perpetrators because I didn’t know if it was safe,” Oppenheimer said. “But when I did, I found an astounding openness, a willingness to talk about the most awful details of the killings, often with smiles on their faces.”

Oppenheimer said almost every perpetrator he encountered was willing to give him detailed accounts of the killings.

“I had this queasy feeling that I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power and thought this must be what it would be like,” he said.

The Academy Award nomination has brought much attention to the film in recent months, leading the government in Indonesia to acknowledge that the killings were wrong, rather than being heroic and something to be celebrated, Oppenheimer said.

He said getting the word out in Indonesia, though, was dangerous.

When the editor of Tempo magazine, the largest news magazine in Indonesia, watched “The Act of Killing” for the first time, he contacted Oppenheimer.

He said he wanted to show Indonesians the killings talked about in the film could happen anywhere in the country.

As of last summer, there were 1,200 public screenings of “The Act of Killing” in 118 cities.

Oppenheimer said he hopes his film persuades people to acknowledge a significant problem that they may not have been fully aware of.