We keep, in our own private catalogue of cinema, a shelf we return to rarely: films that refuse the conventions of documentary storytelling, that don’t just record reality but rebuild it in front of our eyes to expose a deeper layer of truth underneath. On that shelf sits The Act of Killing, which we first watched in 2012 and left feeling something we rarely feel: that we had just witnessed a surreal cinematic experience with no real precedent.

Its director, Joshua Oppenheimer, an American based in Denmark, had spent years in Indonesia trying to reach the survivors of an old atrocity, only to find the authorities blocking every attempt. It was the survivors themselves who gave him the strange advice that changed the project: film the killers instead. What he found were elderly men boasting about their crimes on camera without a trace of shame, so he built the film around a dangerous device — “reenactment” — letting them restage their own killings in whatever cinematic genre they fancied: gangster film, musical, melodrama. Through that unsettling game, the film exposed not the psychology of a few marginal criminals, but the machinery of a complete, functioning state crime.

Oppenheimer followed it with a companion film, The Look of Silence (2014), which turns the camera toward the victims’ families, centering on a survivor who confronts, with unsettling calm, the men who killed his brother.

The first film alone took roughly eight years to make, and much of its Indonesian crew — including one of its co-directors — had to work under pseudonyms or without any credit at all, wary of a retaliation that remained plausible even half a century later. It was produced under the wing of two towering names in documentary cinema, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary Feature; its companion film received the same nomination two years later. That two films about a crime almost no one outside Indonesia has heard of were celebrated on the world’s biggest stages is itself a small paradox worth sitting with before we go any further.

So what exactly had we watched? What is this massacre the films are built around — one ranked among the bloodiest political purges of the twentieth century, yet almost entirely absent from the global historical memory most of us carry?

Part of the answer to that absence is available immediately. While the world’s cameras in the mid-1960s were fixed on the Vietnam War burning along the same region’s eastern edge, Indonesia’s massacre passed through the international press almost silently — perhaps because its victims weren’t killed by a foreign army’s bullets but by their own neighbors, and perhaps because the regime that followed spent decades enforcing a domestic silence that blocked any public account of what happened. That silence wasn’t meaningfully broken on the world stage until Oppenheimer’s camera arrived half a century later and handed the microphone to the killers themselves, surfacing a crime that had spent decades locked inside a local memory no one was allowed to speak aloud.

black and white archival documentary film still Indonesia

Necessary Background: Sukarno and the Balance of Power

To understand what happened, we need to step back. Under President Sukarno, Indonesia was a singular political experiment: an attempt to hold together three mutually suspicious forces — nationalism, religion, and communism — inside a single project he called Nasakom. This wasn’t intellectual indulgence; it was survival strategy for a young state scattered across thousands of islands, dozens of ethnicities, and multiple religions.

At the center of that balancing act stood the Indonesian Communist Party, no marginal player: with roughly three million members, it was the third-largest communist party in the world, behind only China and the Soviet Union. That weight turned Indonesia into a sensitive fulcrum of the global Cold War — Washington watched the party’s rising influence with real alarm, while Moscow and Beijing saw in Sukarno a potential ally within the Non-Aligned Movement he himself had helped found.

A decade before the events we’re describing, Sukarno had hosted the 1955 Bandung Conference, laying the foundations of non-alignment alongside other Asian and African leaders who refused full allegiance to either Cold War bloc. But that careful balance began tilting leftward through the early 1960s, as Sukarno’s anti-imperialist rhetoric sharpened and Indonesia entered a low-level military confrontation with the newly formed Malaysian Federation, which he saw as a British scheme to prolong colonial influence in Southeast Asia. That specific friction with London, as we’ll see, left a documented if indirect mark on what followed.

The Spark: The Night of September 30

On the night of September 30 into the early hours of October 1, 1965, a group of officers calling themselves the “30 September Movement” kidnapped and killed six senior army generals; a seventh escaped by leaping over the wall of his home, though his aide and young daughter paid the price for that survival. The movement announced it was preempting a coup against President Sukarno by a Western-aligned “Council of Generals,” and dumped the generals’ bodies in an abandoned well south of Jakarta that later became known as Lubang Buaya — Crocodile Hole — now an official memorial taught in every Indonesian school as a symbol of communist treachery. But General Suharto, commander of the army’s strategic reserve and conspicuously absent from the target list, moved with striking speed, retook control within hours, and pointed the finger squarely at the Indonesian Communist Party as the movement’s mastermind.

That night remains, to this day, weighed down by more than one competing account. It may have genuinely been an operational arm of the party’s leadership — the official version on which Suharto built thirty-two years of legitimacy. Or, as other historians argue, it may have been a purely internal army affair: a revolt by junior officers disgusted with the “Council of Generals” and its privileges, later exploited by Suharto and his allies to eliminate rivals inside the military before the blame was pinned entirely on the communists. The one point beyond dispute is that whatever the movement actually was, within days it became the pretext for a systematic extermination campaign it did not itself design.

Here begins the darker chapter. Between late 1965 and early 1966, a coordinated killing wave swept through Java, Sumatra, and Bali, taking an estimated five hundred thousand to a million lives, while hundreds of thousands more were held for years in detention without meaningful trial.

What deserves real reflection here is that this violence was, at its core, rarely a clash between religiously or ethnically distinct camps — it was, far more often, violence within the same community: Muslims killing Muslims accused of communism, Hindus in Bali killing Hindu neighbors. Amid the terror, many people found themselves forced to adopt an officially recognized religion simply to escape the label “atheist,” which alone was enough to mark someone as a communist deserving death. That coercion pushed large numbers toward Christianity, while Bali’s Hindus were compelled to formally organize their faith so it would qualify among the state’s recognized religions — protection from a charge they never actually held.

The army didn’t act alone. Armed civilian militias took part too, prominent among them the youth wing of the country’s largest Islamic organization, alongside other Islamic groups and the nationalist Pancasila Youth, sweeping and purging village by village. Beyond the dead, roughly a million people were detained without trial; tens of thousands were sent to a forced-labor camp on the remote island of Buru, where some spent over a decade clearing jungle and building farmland before most were released in the late 1970s under mounting international pressure. Among those held there was the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of the towering figures of modern Indonesian literature, never convicted of any charge, who spent close to fourteen years of his life in internal exile and detention.

None of this happened in a vacuum outside its global context. The same logic — using the “communist threat” as pretext for sweeping internal purges with implicit or open Western backing — repeated itself in Chile after General Pinochet’s 1973 coup, and in Argentina during what became known as the “Dirty War.” As in those cases, Washington found in Indonesia’s crackdown an objective ally for its Cold War interests, while London, then locked in its own confrontation with Sukarno over Malaysia, found an opportunity to steer Indonesian public opinion through a covert propaganda unit run out of its Foreign Office — a role later confirmed by declassified British documents.

The Cold War was never simply a contest between two ideologies. It was also a standing willingness among the great powers to look away from an enormous human cost, so long as the outcome tilted the scales of the desired “world order.”

From the Shadows to the Throne: Suharto and the New Order

Suharto assumed effective power with striking quiet, gradually sidelining Sukarno without ever declaring an open coup, until he became president in name as well as fact, opening what became known as the “New Order” — thirty-two years in duration. Its early decades brought relative economic stability, alongside a structural corruption that reached every joint of the state and economy, until the president’s own family became shorthand for wealth no one could quite explain.

To run the economy, Suharto leaned on a group of American-trained Indonesian economists informally nicknamed the “Berkeley Mafia,” who delivered notable growth in his first two decades through openness to foreign investment. Alongside that economic opening, the state tightened its grip on political and intellectual life: the Communist Party was banned outright, a ban that still stands today; the official state philosophy, Pancasila, was imposed as the only permitted ideological basis for any civic or political organization; and the press operated under strict censorship that lasted until the late 1990s.

That system finally collapsed in 1998, when an Asian financial crisis tore through Indonesia’s economy and ignited mass protests that forced Suharto to resign after arranging for his vice president, B.J. Habibie, to succeed him. And here we’re entitled to ask: was that handover truly a “fall” in the full sense of the word, or was it closer to a carefully staged transition, designed to keep the system’s substance intact while only its façade changed? Had this same transition happened in a country without Indonesia’s deep strategic ties to the West, we might well have seen a far more radical break in the political order itself.

Documents No Longer Secret

After decades of silence, Washington in 2017 declassified thousands of diplomatic cables showing its Jakarta embassy had near-daily, detailed knowledge of the massacres as they unfolded — and had, at points, handed the Indonesian army lists of Communist Party cadre names. Years later, declassified British files revealed a separate covert propaganda unit run by the Foreign Office out of Singapore, urging Indonesian military commanders to “root out the communist cancer” — a campaign that, at its core, was less a principled anti-communist stand than retaliation against Sukarno over his standoff with London on Malaysia.

These documents alone don’t shift responsibility for Indonesia’s internal decision to kill onto the West. What they do show, unambiguously, is that the decision wasn’t made in an international vacuum — and that those with the power to influence events chose, at best, complicit silence. It’s worth acknowledging, though, that some historians argue the scale of Western “complicity,” while well documented on the propaganda and logistical side, doesn’t rise to actual planning or direct incitement of the massacre itself, and that the Indonesian army was fully capable of executing what it executed with no outside signal at all. The line between knowledge-and-messaging on one hand, and decision-and-execution on the other, remains a legitimate, unresolved scholarly dispute.

The Reform Era: Did the System Really Change?

Since Suharto’s resignation, six presidents have held Indonesia’s highest office: B.J. Habibie, then Abdurrahman Wahid, then Megawati Sukarnoputri, then Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, then Joko Widodo, and now Prabowo Subianto. Along the way, governance shifted from closed appointments to direct elections, and from suffocating media control to a considerably wider — if imperfect — space for free expression.

But the uncomfortable question that won’t go away is this: did the system actually change, or did only the method of governing change, while the same political and military class — the one that emerged from Suharto’s shadow without ever facing accountability — kept its seat at the table? It’s true that talking about the 1965 killings is no longer forbidden the way it once was, and that Indonesian researchers and journalists now write about it with growing freedom. But there is still no official judicial acknowledgment of it as a state crime, and not a single senior official has ever stood trial for it. The contrast with South Africa is instructive: its Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced a public, official acknowledgment of apartheid-era crimes, even if that acknowledgment fell short of full criminal justice. Indonesia hasn’t reached even that minimal threshold of official recognition.

None of this means nothing has changed. Since 2004, the country has held a succession of direct presidential elections, along with sweeping administrative decentralization that gave regions powers unimaginable under the New Order, and a far wider space for press freedom and civil society than the previous era allowed. But that opening has traveled alongside unresolved files of its own — ongoing tensions in West Papua chief among them, and a middling position on global corruption indices that reflects anything but a clean break from the New Order’s structural corruption.

The Religious Dimension

The 1965 massacre wasn’t, at its root, a religious event — it was a political purge wearing a religious mask. But its long-term consequences carried a clear religious imprint: a later rise of more conservative Islam, alongside a marked spread of Christianity, Buddhism, and formally organized Hinduism in their traditional strongholds. A careful eye might read the sometimes striking overcorrection in outward religiosity — headscarves, temple-building — as an unconscious collective attempt at self-protection against the return of similar authoritarianism, achieved by positioning oneself clearly within a recognized religious identity that admits no doubt or reinterpretation. So even though the killings weren’t religiously caused, their aftermath reshaped Indonesia’s religious map entirely, in ways still visible in society today.

Indonesia Today

More than a quarter century after Suharto’s fall, Indonesia looks like a relatively stable presidential democracy, holding balanced relations with its regional neighbors and diversified economic partnerships with the West, China, and the Asian Tigers alike, amid clear development indicators that place it within the G20. Alongside that seat at the world’s economic top table, it’s a founding member of ASEAN and the largest economy in the region — a position hard to ignore in any conversation about the shifting balance of power in a rising Asia.

Popular Wisdom

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an ordinary Indonesian citizen, and that your own family lived through those events and passed them down to you in their full, painful detail: the neighbor who vanished, the relative forced to change faith, the silence enforced for decades. You know exactly what kind of political and military class ruled your country, and exactly what small and large compromises your family had to make to stay alive. Then you took part, or someone before you did, in the popular uprising that toppled Suharto in 1998 — only to realize later that the same class had simply remained in place, and that your country, bound by geography and interest to the West, was meant to keep its system intact to preserve a wider balance you never had a real vote in.

What’s left to you, faced with that visible powerlessness, but a symbolic act? So, in the end, you cast your vote for the daughter of the first president who was deposed, Megawati Sukarnoputri, carrying her to the presidency in 2001 — as if handing history a belated apology for victims its grinding wheel had simply forgotten, even as that symbolic act changed remarkably little about the actual balance of power.

This is perhaps exactly what makes the Indonesian case a mirror far wider than its own geography. It raises a question that belongs to no single archipelago: is it enough to change the faces at the top to absolve the system that produced them? Or does memory, left hanging without trial or official apology, become its own quieter form of violence — slower, more silent, but no less cruel than the first?

Executioners, left unaccountable long enough, turn from criminals into witnesses to themselves — reenacting their own crimes in front of a camera that condemns them less than it opens a narrow door, for whoever wants to look, onto how an entire nation can stay silent for this long.

Watch “The Act of Killing” (Full Movie w/ Commentary by Joshua Oppenheimer & Werner Herzog):

The Act of Killing – Full Film with Director’s Commentary

References

Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2012)
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Look of Silence (2014)
National Security Archive, “Indonesia Mass Murder 1965: U.S. Embassy Files,” 2017: Source link
Human Rights Watch, statement on declassified U.S. documents, 2017: Source link
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “September 30th Movement”: Source link
Press reporting on declassified British Foreign Office propaganda documents, 2021

Indonesia 1965 | A Massacre Never Tried, a System Unchanged

Necessary Background: Sukarno and the Balance of Power

The Spark: The Night of September 30

From the Shadows to the Throne: Suharto and the New Order

Documents No Longer Secret