Picture via Drafthouse Films.

Although it lost the Academy Award for Best Documentary to 20 Feet From Stardom (snubbed—snubbed, I say!), Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is perhaps the most important documentary of the past decade. The film, which landed atop DCist’s Best Films of 2013 list, examines the perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide and how they’ve built a regime of impunity from their atrocious crimes against humanity. Through the wholly innovative and utterly fascinating narrative framing of having the perpetrators recreate the methods they killed thousands of people through cinematic dramatizations, the film forces them to face the reality of what they’ve done in a way they never had before.

Recently, DCist spoke over the phone to Oppenheimer, one of the film’s directors, on the long process of making the film, his relationship with its primary subject, former gangster Anwar Congo, and how the film’s Academy Award nomination has forced the Indonesian government to acknowledge its own painful history.

(This interview has been edited for clarity and length)

DCist: How did you decide you wanted to make a documentary on Anwar Congo and these Indonesian gangsters? What’s your background with this topic?

Joshua Oppenheimer: I actually first went to Indonesia in 2001, to make a film with a community of palm oil plantation workers working and living on a plantation about 60 miles from Medan, the city where we made The Act of Killing. They were working for a Belgium multinational company, and the company was making the women workers spray a weed-killing herbicide with no protective clothing, and the mist was getting into their lungs and bloodstream and dissolving their liver tissue gradually, over time. Women were dying in their 40s from liver disease. And yet, they were afraid to organize a union, because when they would protest or made demands they would be attacked by paramilitary youth members the company hired—the paramilitary coup that’s in The Act of Killing. They knew that their parents and grandparents that had been in a strong plantation workers union until 1965 had been accused of being communist sympathizers simply because they were in a union and had been killed for it. So they were afraid that could happen again.

After we made that film, they said “Come back as quickly as you can and let’s make a film together about why we’re afraid and what it’s like for us to live with the perpetrators all around us still in a position of power, essentially threatening to do this again to us again if we step out of line.” We came back immediately to do that work in early 2003, but the army stationed outside of every village in Indonesia found out what we were doing and would no longer let the survivors participate in this film. The survivors said “Before you give up and go home, why don’t you try to film some of the aging death squad leaders—some of them are our neighbors in the village—maybe they’ll tell you how our relatives were killed.” I didn’t know if it was safe to approach these perpetrators, but when I did I found to my horror that all of them were immediately open about the grisly details of the killings, boastfully recounting the worst of it, often with smiles on their faces all in front of their families and little grandchildren.

I had this awful feeling like I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power. I showed this material back to those survivors who wanted to see it and then, astonished, we all flew to show it to the Human Rights Committee and everyone who saw the material said “You’re onto something so important, keep filming the perpetrators.” Because anyone, anywhere in the world who finds this will be forced to acknowledge not just the moral catastrophe and genocide, but more importantly the moral catastrophe of the present-day regime, that the killers continue to rule over.

I then spent two years feeling entrusted by the survivors and the human rights community to do the work they certainly couldn’t safely do themselves; to film every perpetrator I could find. I did that in constant dialogue with the survivors and the human rights community in Indonesia. At the end of that two years, everyone was boastful, everyone would invite me to the places where they killed and want to show me how they killed. I worked my way through the countryside up the chain of command and found Anwar Congo. Anwar was in fact the 41st perpetrator I filmed at the end of that two-year period. The scene on the roof at the beginning of the film where he shows how he killed people with wire, that was the first day I met him. In many ways it was a difficult first day of filming—as it would be with any particular perpetrator—and we spent five years filming together because I lingered on him. I felt his pain was so close to the surface and I could see that his pain was somehow intimately involved with his bravado and his boasting.

The first day I meet him he dances where he’s killed hundreds of people, and I suddenly realize, “wait a moment, he’s dancing because he’s trying to forget what he’s done.” This is one of the most grotesque images of boastful bravado I filmed and yet it was emerging not for the fact that he was really proud of what he’d done, but actually the opposite: The fact that he knew it was wrong and was trying to run away from that fact. I started to realize perhaps the boasting that I spent all this time filming really isn’t a sign of pride; it’s a sign that these men know what they’ve done is wrong and are desperately trying to convince themselves otherwise.

DCist: What’s the reaction in Indonesia been to your film?

JO: The film has been screened thousands of times in hundreds of cities in Indonesia and it’s available for free download and streaming in Indonesia. It has transformed the way ordinary Indonesians have been talking about the past. Indonesians have come out to say publicly and without fear exactly what you’d expect them to say after a film like this, which is that of course all the propaganda they’ve been taught is a lie and that the perpetrators were the people in the wrong here. That we need to examine not just the moral catastrophe of what happened, but the moral catastrophe of the regime the killers built and that still applies today.

The media has very much said the same thing, and has finally started to talk about the genocide as a genocide, breaking what was a half-century silence. The largest news magazine in Indonesia—Tempo Magazine—published a special edition of their magazine, packed with 75 pages of killer’s testimonies from all over the country, showing that the film was a repeatable experiment, that could have been made anywhere in Indonesia. That there’s thousands of Anwars. That the present-day problems of corruption, fear, and gangsterism is systemic.

And the Academy Award nomination finally triggered the government to break their silence on the film. They’ve been keeping silent, hoping it would go away, but I think the Academy Award nomination made them realize it wouldn’t. Their statement was wholly inadequate in that they said “we don’t need a film to force us to look at these things.” But what’s most important about the government’s statement is that it’s a 180-degree about face from everything they said previously. Until now they’ve been calling the 1965 genocides a heroic chapter in Indonesian history. They said in the statement “It is a crime against humanity, but we don’t need a film to force us to deal with these things. We will be looking at them on our own time.” This was the first time the government had ever admitted that the killings were wrong.

DCist: I think the film is great for how it breaks narrative boundaries to tell the perpetrator’s stories, by recreating them in these highly cinematic dramatizations. At what point in the filmmaking process did that idea become evident to you?

JO: It was something that I conceived in response to the open boastfulness of the perpetrators. I was getting something from them—all of them—long before I met Anwar. As I said he was the 41st person I interviewed—I had this feeling that I was getting something close to a performance. The question for any performance is “Who is the imagined audience?” How do they think their fellow Indonesians will respond to their boasting, how do they think the rest of the world will hear their boasting? I don’t see it as a matter of illustrating an important story in a cinematic way. I see the dramatizations as an attempt to answer and investigate the most important questions in this situation. And the view of this situation is the regime of total impunity for the worst crimes imaginable. And the most important questions are of course: How does this regime function? How do these killers remain in power? How do they justify themselves to glorify their actions? How do they lie to themselves to justify their actions? They impose these lies on the whole society. What are the effects of those lies? What are the effects of those stories? How do they use those lies to escape from their most bitter and painful truths? What are the consequences of this denial? How do they want to be seen? How do they see themselves? And to answer these questions, I encouraged them to show me what they’ve done in whatever way they wish. It came very naturally. Every perpetrator I met would invite me to the places they killed within minutes of meeting them. They’d offer to show me how they killed or would just spontaneously do it.

Although it came naturally, I didn’t anticipate an elaborate, cinematic, genre-inspired dramatization. That evolved organically when I reached Anwar and started to linger on him. I knew from that first scene on the roof that there was human pain behind the boasting. He was dancing because he was trying to run away from this pain. I wondered that, if I showed him the footage, will he recognize that pain? I screen it back for him and I think he does recognize what that scene means. He looks very disturbed but he does not dare to say what’s wrong, because he’s never been forced to admit what was wrong.

DCist: Has Anwar seen the film, if so, what were his thoughts on it?

JO: He has. When Anwar saw the film he was very moved by it, he was very emotional. He was silent for a long, long time and then when he pulled himself together he said “Josh, this film shows what it’s like to be.”

DCist: To what extent do you think the final scene (the one with the retching) is a genuine moment of contrition? Was any of it performance?

JO: I’m 100 percent sure he’s not acting anything out there with the retching. He’s trying to do exactly what I asked him to do, which was to take me back to the place where he killed and show me how he killed. That’s what he’s trying to do. I think his body is seized, physically, by this revulsion. I also wouldn’t say it’s contrition. I think in some ways, because viewers—particularly in the United States—are used to films where there’s redemption for the main character, that they perhaps assume that that final scene is meant to somehow signify remorse. It isn’t. It doesn’t signify remorse for me. It shows that what he’s done has destroyed him and taken effect on his body. I have no doubt—there’s not even a shred of possibility in my mind that he’s faking the retching.

When I was there [filming] I had this awful feeling of “Oh no, what’s happening to him?” As someone who cared for him after five years of filming and working with him, I wanted to put my arm around him and say “it’s going to be OK.” And in that moment I realized that, no, of course it’s not going to be OK. This is what happens when it’s never going to be OK. I don’t think he’s forgiven, I don’t think there’s any catharsis for Anwar Congo, and I don’t think there’s any redemption for him. He’s destroyed himself by what he’s done and that’s how I see the final scene.