Knowra The Act of Killing The Act of Killing A 2012 documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer in which Indonesian perpetrators of mass killings reenact their crimes in cinematic genres of their choosing. Its staged scenes expose how perpetrators narrate and perform their past.
Documentary reenactment : The reconstruction of past events within a nonfiction film using staged scenes. Oppenheimer makes reenactment the film’s central method, rather than relying only on archival evidence.
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 : Mass killings and imprisonment of people accused of communism in Indonesia beginning in 1965. These events are the crimes the film’s participants recount and reenact.
Anwar Congo : An Indonesian former death-squad leader who appears as himself in The Act of Killing. His changing relationship to the staged scenes gives the film its most closely followed individual arc.
Documentary ethics : Principles and debates concerning filmmakers’ responsibilities to subjects, audiences, and truth. The film’s staged scenes and collaboration with perpetrators make consent, manipulation, and harm central questions.
Genre cinema : Films organized around recurring conventions such as musicals, crime stories, and westerns. The perpetrators choose familiar genres to stage their past, shaping how violence appears on screen.
Indonesian Communist Party : A major Indonesian political party that was destroyed after the military takeover of 1965. Accusations of communist affiliation were used to justify the killings shown in the film’s accounts.
Adi Zulkadry : An Indonesian former paramilitary leader who appears in The Act of Killing. His confident defenses of violence contrast with Anwar’s visible distress.
Collective memory : The shared ways a group remembers and interprets its past. The film confronts an official public memory that left perpetrators’ accounts dominant.
Perpetrator testimony : First-person accounts by people who carried out or enabled political violence. The perpetrators narrate their actions directly, making their claims and evasions part of the evidence.
Suharto : Indonesia’s president from 1967 to 1998, whose New Order regime followed the 1965 crisis. The perpetrators’ impunity and public authority persisted under the political order established by Suharto.
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