The Act of Killing

In October 1965, Indonesia began a purge.

After the events of 30 September that year, Suharto moved to replace Sukarno; over the following months members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), trade-union and peasant-organisation cadres, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese — anyone identified as a communist or a sympathiser — were killed in large numbers. Estimates of the dead range from half a million to well over a million, depending on the scholar. This month marks 61 years since the purge began.

What this film is about is the killers' later lives.

The purge was never accounted for in Indonesia. The paramilitary groups and gangsters who carried it out — the largest being Pancasila Youth — were not prosecuted; they entered the state instead. Four decades later they still operate openly on the streets of Medan and still take pride in what they did.

Joshua Oppenheimer did not use the usual documentary method. He did not interrogate, gather evidence or accuse. He asked them what kind of films they liked best, and then invited them to restage what they had done in the genre of their choice — gangster picture, film noir, musical. He gave them a crew, costumes and cameras.

The result is a documentary directed by, written by and starring the killers themselves.

Why recommend it today?

First, it is the first documentary in this archive. All 22 previous entries were fiction (Close-Up, 1990, is docufiction and only a partial fit). The genre sat at zero; today it does not.

Second, it is the archive's first film from Southeast Asia, and its first from Indonesia.

Third, it forms a sharp pair with a film already on the site. Close-Up (1990) has an ordinary man, Sabzian, re-enact himself in front of a camera after impersonating a director. This film has a group of men who were never tried re-enact themselves. Both refuse to explain their subjects; both put the act of re-enactment itself in front of the audience — but one is about a man who longs to be seen, and the other about men history has already forgiven.

And the plainest reason: what is most disturbing here is not the violence but how smoothly it all goes. The killers cooperate, enjoy themselves, and treat the whole thing as an honour. Accepting the BAFTA, Oppenheimer spoke of Britain and America's "collective responsibility" for these crimes; that passage was cut from BAFTA's own online video.

故事从棉兰一间电影院的门外开始。

Anwar Congo 年轻时在那里倒卖黑市票。后来他成了一支处决队的头目——按他自己的说法，他亲手杀过「多达一千人」。

四十多年后，一位丹麦导演找到了他，并且问了一个听上去几乎荒谬的问题：

你们最喜欢什么类型的电影？

Anwar 和他的朋友们回答了。他们挑了黑帮片、黑色电影、歌舞片。导演给了他们剧组、服装和摄影机，请他们把自己当年做过的事——勒死、刺死、把尸体丢进河里——按照自己挑的类型重演一遍。

他们答应了。他们甚至很兴奋。

然后，镜头一直没有停。

（这里不再往下说。这部影片的过程本身就是它的内容，请不要提前去查结局。）

A documentary that handed the camera to the killers

The Act of Killing (Indonesian title Jagal, "Butcher") is a 2012 documentary, 122 minutes, in Indonesian, co-produced by Denmark, Indonesia, Norway and the United Kingdom. It was directed by Joshua Oppenheimer with Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian co-director — anonymity that is stated in the credits because the risk is real.

The executive producers are Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, which is a useful clue: both have spent careers on the line between the real and the performed, and this film is what is left after that line is erased.

Method: not interviews, but a commission

The central figure is Anwar Congo, a former black-market ticket scalper outside a Medan cinema who became a death-squad leader. In the film he estimates that he personally killed "as many as 1,000 people."

Oppenheimer's method was to ask the men which film genres they loved, then fund and crew those films. So stranglings, stabbings and bodies thrown into rivers are restaged in the manner of film noir; there are musical-style production numbers; there is a film-within-the-film called Arsan dan Aminah. Anwar and his friends operated cameras and designed scenes themselves.

From roughly 1,000 hours of footage, 35 hours went to the edit; the finished film runs 122 minutes (the director's cut runs 167). The sound was mixed in the soap-opera studios of the state broadcaster TVRI, an institution also within this organisation's orbit.

Structure: one man's psychological arc

What actually moves the film is Anwar Congo himself. He begins cheerfully, treating his methods as anecdotes and demonstrating them on the spot; midway he plays a victim in a restaged execution and has a genuine panic attack; at the end he returns to the rooftop where he used to kill, and begins to retch while recounting it.

The director's cut ends there: a man who was never tried, collapsing at the scene of his own crimes, undone by his own memory.

The argument it caused

The film did not rest on praise. Nick Fraser, the commissioning editor of BBC Storyville, called it a "snuff film" and publicly urged that it not receive an Oscar; Robert Cribb of the Australian National University criticised it for supplying almost no historical context, distilling 1965 into an abstract story about "human nature."

Both criticisms deserve to be taken seriously. The film really does not explain the purge, and it does not give the victims' side equal time — Oppenheimer addressed that with the companion film The Look of Silence (2014), which follows a victim's family as they confront the man who killed a brother.

Reception

• Rotten Tomatoes 95% (163 reviews, 8.8/10 average); Metacritic 92/100 (34 reviews, "universal acclaim")
• BAFTA Award for Best Documentary (67th); European Film Award for Best Documentary, 2013; Asia Pacific Screen Award; Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature (86th)
• BFI's 2015 poll of the greatest documentaries: #19; BBC's 2016 critics' poll of the greatest films since 2000: #14; The Guardian's best films of the 21st century: #16; The New York Times' 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (June 2025): #82
• In 2013 it topped the year-end lists of Sight & Sound, The Guardian and LA Weekly

Its Indonesian release is a piece of underground film history in itself

The film was never submitted to the Indonesian censorship board. Screenings began secretly on 1 November 2012; on 10 December, Human Rights Day, it played in at least 50 venues across 30 cities; between May and August 2013, 1,096 DVDs were distributed to 118 cities in 29 provinces; on 17 August 2013, Indonesian independence day, 45 public screenings were held; on 30 September 2013, the local day of remembrance for the massacres, it was given a free online screening for Indonesian audiences only; on 17 December 2013 it went up on YouTube.