The Act Of Killing, Directed By Joshua Oppenheimer

The Act of Killing is a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. The film is a continuation from another documentary he was trying to make about the 1965-66 mass murders committed in Indonesia. Instead of documenting the families of the victims of the killings, who were afraid to open up, Oppenheimer decides to switch directions and document the killers. The killers of the purge are proud men, who are considered national heroes and celebrities with political influences; so when Oppenheimer filmed these men at the grounds of their murder sites, he was startled to find gangster and the founding father of the right-wing paramilitary group Pemuda Pancasila, Anwar Congo, had a different reaction. “I’ve tried to forget all this with good music…dancing...feeling happy…a little alcohol…a little marijuana…a little…what do you call it? Estasy. [Ecstasy] Once I’d get drunk. I’d ‘fly’ and feel happy.”
Oppenheimer follows the process of making each of the scenes of the movies: a gangster, western, war, and musical scene. Two scenes that appear to disturb Congo are the gangster scene, and the war scene. In the gangster scene, Congo becomes upset when they blindfold the victim and wrap a wire around his neck-just like he did in his killings- and utters to stop the scene because the room is getting hot. In the war scene, the group kills a Communist, and in Congo’s character’s nightmare, the Communist comes back to haunt him just like in Congo’s real nightmares. Congo doesn’t preform the scene to the group’s expectations, and-seeing that he plays victim- realizes the killings might have been terribly