Film on Indonesia's Chinese massacre gets Oscar nod

By Zhang Rui: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, January 21, 2014

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A documentary film about Indonesia's massacre involving 300,000 ethnic Chinese has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards.

A poster of "The Act of Killing" [Photo/Sina.com]

The widely acclaimed "The Act of Killing" reflects the dark era between 1965 and 1968, in which the nation's bloody anti-communist purges took place. It is a Danish-British-Norwegian co-production directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and co-directed by Christine Cynn and one anonymous Indonesian director.

The film explores the Indonesian killings of 1965, which were in fact part of an anti-communist purge following a failed coup of the "September 30 Movement" in the country. The upheavals led to the downfall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto's 30-year-long presidency.

When the government of Indonesia was overthrown in 1965, Anwar Congo and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market, to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than 1 million alleged communists, including 300,000 ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than one year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Congo himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.

In the film, Congo and his friends dance their way through musical numbers, twist their arms in film noir gangster scenes and gallop across the prairies like yodeling cowboys. Their foray into filmmaking is being celebrated in the media and receives much (televised) debate, despite the fact that Congo and his friends are actually mass murderers.

"With leading candidates personally responsible for crimes against humanity, and glorifying a history of genocide to build a climate of fear, there is a very real risk that the country will backslide toward military dictatorship," Oppenheimer said in a statement upon hearing of the film's Oscar nomination on January 16, 2014.

"We hope that this nomination will put the film, and the issues of impunity that it raises, on the front pages of Indonesian newspapers -- at a time when Indonesians must urgently debate how impunity for mass murder has led to a moral vacuum of fear, corruption and 'thuggery.'" He also credited the survivors of the 1965 purges, "who courageously defied army threats to tell us their stories and inspired us to make this film," as well as his anonymous Indonesian crew and co-director who still fear the revenge of the death-squad killers.

One audience member after a screening in Berlin said that what Oppenheimer had done was "like having SS officers re-enact the Holocaust." Oppenheimer replied that it was not at all similar to any such action "because 'the Nazis are no longer in power," whereas the death squad members shown in the documentary are still being protected by the Indonesian government.

Movie review website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 95 percent approval rating for the film and its consensus reads, "Raw, terrifying and painfully difficult to watch, 'The Act of Killing' offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema."