This film will be introduced by Wouter Werner, a professor international law at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and extraordinary professor at the University of Curaçao.
The Act of Killing
In 1965, Indonesian President Sukarno was deposed, after which the army led by General Suharto opened the hunt for anyone suspected of communist sympathies. An estimated 1 million people were killed by the army in the process, aided by paramilitary gangs and death squads.
Anwar Congo was leader of one such death squad. Before the coup, he and his friends sold cinema tickets on the black market; after the coup, inspired by all the violence he had seen on the silver screen, he turned into a ruthless killer. Anwar allegedly killed hundreds of people with his own hands; he never repented.
In this acclaimed documentary, director Joshua Oppenheimer offers Anwar and his former companions the chance to make a film about that period, in which they can show what those killings were like. When Anwar has to play the role of a victim, for the first time he realises what he did at the time.
