THE ACT OF KILLING

Directors: Anonymous, Christine Cynn, Joshua Oppenheimer

Running time: 159 minutes

For most apolitical Indonesians, the new order regime remembered for its stability and progressive economical development. It was the peaceful time for most Indonesians when the prices of daily commodities were in the reach of most people, education were attainable and the middle class grows significantly. But little did they know that the so called "stability" was paved and paid by the bloods of their fellow brothers and sisters killed in the post 1965 pogrom in some areas in Indonesia. The merciless pogroms killed approximately hundreds of thousands of people, they were killed without even being trialed at all. They were killed simply because they were accused of being communist sympathizer. Was these accusations true remains to be unknown until today.

Why is it related to us now? It is because the whole new order regime was built upon the fear of communism and their sympathizers. Communist are equal with evil, cruelty and malice. The whole 30th September movement that killed six generals and an officer in 1965 was blamed solely on communist agents, who, according to the new order's government version, infiltrated the army to conduct those murders. So the new order regime keeps reminding people that communist sympathizers were wrong and "deserved" to be marginalized, even killed. The times were different back then, it was the cold war and the country was sharply divided over these things.

Most Indonesians do not know about these pogroms, some know it from hearsay and carefully edited history from the new order regime and off course it does not appear in the official history book Indonesians studied at school. The world according to the new order regime was as easy as black and white, black being the godless communist oppressors, and white being the brave anti communist, fighting the commies to unite the country. The ghost of communism need to be kept alive so the leaders of the new order regime can still hold their power.

But you cannot hid a rotten fish longer than three days, after the new order regime falls and what was once forbidden to be known by common people can now be accessed freely, people began to know each horrible aspects of the new order, not just the pogroms but also the silencing of political activist and many human rights abuses done in the name to preserve the so called "stability" of the new order regime. Some price you have to pay eh? What happened to the idea that a nation belongs to everyone without marginalization regardless of so many thing?

Then comes this chilling documentary from Joshua Oppenheimer that does not deal with the grand scale of what happened in Jakarta in 1965. In fact, if the whole 1965 pogrom thing were a picture, Oppenheimer just took a pixel of it in the form of Anwar Congo, a famous executor in Medan, North Sumatra, who claims have killed thousands of people.

Congo is an old man now, suitable to become a grandfather. He told his story of executing people with a smile. He also had his friends, fellow executioner, to tell his story. But this documentary is more than that, in a bitter turn, Oppenheimer gave these perpetrators their own "movie". He gives them a stage where these executioners re enact what they have done almost 50 years ago. It is very creepy but real.

What follows is how the "film" was made with the help of a famous paramilitary organization in Indonesia. As the film progressed, we see how these executioners questions what they have done and how the recent Indonesian political scene is keeping these people and their paramilitary organization, alive and well. We also see the bizarre film that Congo and friends trying to show, it felt like made by Alexander Jodorowsky and I wonder what the film looks like as a whole.

As a documentary The Act of Killing is successful in telling a gray and gruesome story without showing any real blood at all. It shows us, Indonesians, that we had a terrible past we must not repeat and shows international viewers that a documentary about an executioner like this is one of a kind. 

This documentary does not defend any ideology, it just shows us the banality of evil, the absurd cause on why the killing happened and what the executioners felt, do they feel some guilt or can they sleep well at night. After seeing this, you just realized that what Congo had done is just a tiny pixel in a big picture from Indonesia's troubling (and bloody) past. One cannot stop wondering what sort of picture consisted of these pixels. Are we able to look at it?