Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Talent: Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, Haji Anif, Symasul Arifin
Release Date: 28th June 2013
In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. In tandem with paramilitary forces and organised criminals, and with the backing of Western governments, the regime orchestrated mass killings of alleged ‘communists’ that claimed anywhere between one and 2.5 million lives. Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary invites those responsible — who are still in power today — to re-enact their crimes through the medium of film, an offer which they eagerly accept.
Anwar Congo, a man revered in Indonesia as a fearsome killer, estimated to have executed in the region of 1,000 people, is a candid interview subject, at first cheerfully re-enacting his methods — a steel wire garrote drawn between a wall and a small plank held by the executioner — and enthusiastically acting on-set as a producer for the film-within-a-film in which the atrocities are revisited as a technicolour, soft-focus spectacle (he openly extols the films of John Wayne, Elvis Presley, et al), before seeming to be overwhelmed by guilt, faced with the enormity of his crimes, or at least a representation of them. Anwar is haunted in his dreams by those he killed. One scene in the film shows the ghost of a dead communist tormenting Anwar through muggy dry ice and thunderclaps. An earlier scene, in which the sacking of a village is rehearsed on the street, sees a close-up of one of the gangsters’ faces: ‘Kill them! Burn their houses!’ give way to a medium-shot of Anwar’s crooked smile, watching from the sidelines. Oppenheimer’s camera is shooting from a distance, its zoom pushed to its limit, each tremble of the hand rendered as an awful shudder: the image seems to be ready to burst at its seams. Later, when the scene is done ‘for real’, the image undulates and shimmers chaotically in the hot air of the burning village. Oppenheimer’s documentary, Anwar’s movie, becomes a visceral, bathetic testament to film as a semaphore for truth, and the impossibility of directing one’s nightmares.
