Joshua Oppenheimer and Indonesia's Massacre Playboys

In his award-winning documentary, The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer has focused on the perpetrators of genocide, and in the process created one of the most original and compelling films in recent memory. I met him at this year’s Berlin film festival to discuss what it means to be human, and why empathy is everything. As various conflicts continue to rage across the Indonesian archipelago, the ramifications of one particular event can still be felt. A botched – and still much debated – coup in 1965 brought President Suharto to power, and with it the sudden and brutal eradication of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Anyone suspected of being a PKI member was killed, their bodies dumped in ditches and mass graves that line the country. The exact figures may never be known, but upwards of a million people died in the space of a few years. Jump ahead to 2004 and American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer is in North Sumatra working on a project that would bring him into contact with many of that period’s survivors. They told him their stories, and he started to bear second-hand witness to the countless atrocities that had occurred. But the details, as frank and painful as they were, came not only from the victims themselves but from the perpetrators too. The elderly men were still living in the same communities in which they had committed their crimes decades before, and almost all were willing to talk – as Oppenheimer explains: "All of the perpetrators I had met were all showing off, and were all performing instead of testifying. And I had met a lot of survivors who were intimidated by this performance that was all around them." He continues: "By 2005 I wasn’t looking for a confession about what happened in 1965, for two reasons: I knew that simply providing documentation, the crimes that occurred, was not sufficient to break the silence. In fact, the killers were talking about what happened all the time. And it didn’t constitute an expose. By the time I started I wanted to find out what the nature of the boasting was, and how is it related to the fear I was seeing." The film focuses predominantly on Anwar Congo – a former, self-styled gangster, playboy and lover of American movies who made his money through ticket scalping at the local cinemas in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra. As the perceived threat of communism intensified across the country Anwar and his friends (including high-ranking officials) went on a bloody killing spree – inspired by the film stars they admired. Their motivations may well have been more financial than political, but to date none of them have been prosecuted.

Joshua Oppenheimer, photographed by Oliver Clasper for VICE.

Other notable individuals in the documentary include Herman – a rotund, pony-tailed playground bully type with political aspirations of his own, who often cuts an angry and frustrated figure. And then there’s Anwar’s old friend Adi Zulkadry. He claims to feel no guilt and at one point even welcomes a war crimes tribunal, but who carries with him a deeper melancholy that he evidently finds hard to live with. Throughout the film Oppenheimer encourages the three to re-enact the killings with themselves playing victims and perpetrators in more lavish, camp and outlandish setups, often dressed to the nines in suits and hats or even in women’s clothing, revelling in the drama and invoked violence. In one telling scene Anwar plays the victim, bound and gagged, the result of which leaves him feeling distraught and disorientated. When we first meet the white-haired Anwar he has returned to the location in which he carried out most of the atrocities – from the initial stages of interrogation through torture and then, finally, death. At first his methods were messy, he says, so he used wire to garrote his victims instead. It was quick and clean. In the film he demonstrates this candidly, ending the grueling segment by dancing the cha-cha as if it was the most normal thing in the world. "I think Anwar right from the beginning of the project is somehow trying to get into his pain, trying to work it through and trying to somehow make what he did okay by making a beautiful movie about it, but also by distancing himself by acting. So I think something very dark was conjured up through the process, and by the end I don’t think Anwar has the strength to consistently look in the mirror every day and say ‘Yes, what I did was wrong.’ I don’t think he knows how to live like that. His whole community has been about celebrating the facts, or even sweeping them under the carpet."

While the overwhelming majority of critics and filmgoers have lauded The Act of Killing a few have questioned the director’s motives, suggesting that by giving such a wide platform to the perpetrators he has ignored the plight of the survivors. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the impression one gets of Oppenheimer (who also speaks Indonesian) is that he is a man deeply committed to both the aesthetics of cinema and the irascible truth – which he insists must be sought whatever the consequences: "One of the problems – and I think religion is implicated in this – is that we as human beings flinch. We mustn’t flinch from the truth, otherwise we’ll dance with our eyes closed over the cliff and right into the abyss." He also suggests that the world is not as black and white as we tend to think, and that in order to find this truth we must empathise with what we often perceive to be "the enemy". In fact, he and Anwar became close during the making of the film, with Oppenheimer even describing him as a friend, of sorts: "I remember my mother asking me if I’d forgiven Anwar and I didn’t even understand the question. It occurred to me throughout the process of making this film that I don’t know how to judge people. I can see you are a human being who has done something bad, but I can’t take the next step and say you’re a bad human being. I think having family, on my father’s and my stepmother’s side, where a lot of people died in the Holocaust, made me think: If we want to understand what happened we have to understand that we don’t live in a Star Wars morality of good guys and bad guys. "We live in world of human beings. As soon as we divide the world into good and bad, and the moment we refuse to identify with Anwar (which is what we’re being asked to do), what we’re really doing is seeking to acknowledge the evils of the world by pulling ourselves out of it. Besides, I think by empathizing with Anwar means that we empathize more with the survivors. He’s a victim too, and he was used."

A scene from The Act of Killing.

In 2011, having accrued over a 1,000 hours of footage, and with the grueling editing process finally under way, a rough cut was seen by the veteran director Werner Herzog, who thought the film so important that he agreed to executive produce it (alongside Errol Morris). And it was not only the name that would help push the film, but the experience that came with it: "Werner Herzog said to me: 'Josh, art doesn’t make a difference…' Then he looked at me for a long time in a way that only Werner Herzog can do, and said, '…until it does.' Somehow it comes at the right moment, but who knows." The Act of Killing has already had a major impact since it was first screened at Telluride, followed by its official premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, along the way picking up the best documentary prize in Copenhagen (CPH:DOX) as well the Audience Award at this year's Berlinale. But more importantly it has already had over 300 screenings in Indonesia, and has been mentioned in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles there. In many ways this is Oppenheimer’s chief aim. "If we can’t get it in cinemas there then we keep the discussion up until something big happens – like an Academy nomination," he says, hopefully. "That would force the Indonesian government to take notice, or at least the Indonesian people. And then we would release it on DVD so everyone can have a copy. And I think this is a film that delivers on its promises. People have read about it and thought, ‘Oh, it can’t possibly be like that’ and have come out and thought that it was more than what they had read about. That’s what I’m most proud of." Ultimately film, and art in general, has the power to enthrall as well as educate. Great pieces of work can, and should, be catalysts for change. One hopes that in some way Oppenheimer’s documentary can radically alter the world in which we live, or at least the way we view such horrific and contentious issues in future. Whether The Act of Killing is that film, only time will tell – but I wouldn’t bet against it.

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