Oscar®-Nominated 'The Act of Killing,' a Dreamlike, Terrifying Journey Into The Minds of Death Squad Leaders, Has National Broadcast Premiere Monday, Oct. 6, 2014 on PBS's POV

NEW YORK, Sept. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The opening scene of The Act of Killing raises the first of many startling questions: What on earth does a line of beautiful female dancers, emerging from a huge fish sculpture beside a picturesque lake—in a scene that looks like it belongs in a Fellini movie—have to do with the massacre of more than 1 million Indonesians in 1965? The second shocking question comes soon after and continues to be raised throughout the film: Why are the men in this documentary, all of them self-proclaimed paramilitary "gangsters" who carried out hundreds, if not thousands, of these murders, often laughing?

The Academy Award®-nominated The Act of Killing, the most-honored documentary of 2013, has its national broadcast premiere on Monday, Oct. 6, 2014 as a special presentation on PBS's POV (Point of View) series. (Check local listings.) American television's longest-running independent documentary series, POV is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

The Act of Killing lets the killers explain their actions in an unusual way. Director Joshua Oppenheimer takes viewers on an unsettling journey through the history and psychology of men who killed without justice or remorse, who not only prospered from their deeds, but remain in power to this day. With obstinate pride, the film's subjects lay bare the moral imagination that makes them heroes in the national myth. In a mind-bending twist, they do so by making their own movie about their brutal deeds in the style of the American westerns, musicals and gangster films they love—playing both victims and perpetrators. There is even a spiritual message in their tale—which is the cue for those dancing maidens.

When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters ("free men," as they call themselves) who controlled the black market in movie tickets to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than 1 million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar killed hundreds of people with his own hands.

Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers.

In The Act of Killing, Anwar and some of the men recall that one reason they sided with the military in 1965 was because the elected government had banned American movies, a source of revenue for them. The media also played a part. Newspaper publisher Ibrahim Sinik not only identified who should be killed, but felt, "as a newspaper man, my job was to make the public hate them." According to one ex-paramilitary, "The key to not feeling guilty is finding the right excuse."

There are hints about the relationship of the military to the paramilitaries. The group Pancasila Youth, which played a conspicuous role in the massacres, is now the country's largest paramilitary organization, with 3 million members. Its gatherings regularly draw government officials, one of whom refers to and Anwar as a "renowned killer."

Today, nearly 50 years after the atrocities, Indonesia has entered an era when children of the executed are beginning to speak out. "All this talk of human rights pisses me off," says Anwar. "Everywhere in the world there are people like me." Hence his need to make a movie.

It is in this movie-within-a-movie that the deepest drama unfolds. Desperate to convince themselves that what they did was right, the killers dramatize their crimes, from attacking entire villages to offering a victim one last cigarette before he dies. But Anwar, who has already been disturbed by bad dreams, is waking to increasingly worsening nightmares, which he and his friends dramatize with costumed characters playing the ghosts of those he killed. Yet after a day's work, he impishly calls his grandchildren in to watch grandpa on television before they go to sleep.

During a break in filming, a paramilitary member helping Anwar direct the re-enactments tells a story from his childhood. "There was a shopkeeper," he says. "He was the only Chinese person in the area. . . . He was my stepfather. At 3 a.m., someone knocked on our door. They called my dad. Mom said, 'It's dangerous! Don't go out.' But he went out. We heard him shout, 'Help!' Then, silence. They took him away. . . . We found his body under an oil drum. . . . Nobody dared help us." He smiles while tears roll down his cheeks. "It's only input for the film," he apologizes. "I promise I'm not criticizing you."

Anwar comes closest to feeling empathy when he plays the part of one of the people he tortured and killed. He believes he can feel his victim's terror and even sheds a tear. From behind the camera, director Joshua Oppenheimer points out, "What your victims felt was far worse, because they were dying, while you are only acting in a film." In that moment, Anwar seems to realize there is an unbridgeable abyss between the real meaning of what he's done and the stories he and the Indonesian regime have told about the killings.

The Act of Killing raises many questions, but perhaps the most awful is this: If, as Anwar Congo says, there are people like him everywhere in the world, will we ever live without terror?

"There is no easy resolution to The Act of Killing," Joshua Oppenheimer explains. "The murder of 1 million people is inevitably fraught with complexity and contradiction. All the more so when the killers have remained in power, when there has been no attempt at justice and when the story has hitherto only been used to intimidate the survivors.

"I have developed a filmmaking method with which I have tried to understand why extreme violence, which we hope would be unimaginable, is not only imaginable, but routinely performed. We attempt to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in both the local and global human story, and to express the real costs of blindness, expedience and the hunger for power in an increasingly unified world society. This is not, finally, a story only about Indonesia. It is a story about us all."

The Act of Killing is a Final Cut for Real, DK production. The film has won more than 70 international awards, including a 2013 European Film Award, a 2013 Asia Pacific Screen Award and the 2014 BAFTA Award for Best Documentary.

About Joshua Oppenheimer, Director:
Born in 1974 in the United States, Joshua Oppenheimer is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is a partner at the production company Final Cut for Real. He has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. He was educated at Harvard and Central Saint Martins, and The Act of Killing is his debut feature-length film. His earlier works include The Globalization Tapes (2003, co-directed with Christine Cynn), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998) and These Places We've Learned to Call Home (1996). He is artistic director of the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film, University of Westminster.

To read the complete press release, visit www.pbs.org/pov/theactofkilling/

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