As this book was being completed, an extraordinary and highly praised documentary was released in the UK. In The Act of Killing (2012), US filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer follows Anwar Congo and his associates, gangsters who belong to a paramilitary death squad employed by the Indonesian army during the 1965–6 genocide in which an estimated one million people deemed to be ‘communists’ were killed, and there were many instances of torture and rape. A former cinema ticket seller, Anwar claims to have been influenced by Hollywood westerns and gangster movies. He also expresses admiration for the films of Elvis Presley and models himself after Hollywood stars. The film's distinctive approach is that it enlists the perpetrators’ collaboration in reenacting their past atrocities. Scenes of genocide are restaged as vignettes from gangster films and musicals or verite-style improvisations with amateur actors who are coaxed into joining the film. The perpetrators relish memories of their own sadism and unabashedly boast about their acts, indicating the impunity they still enjoy today.

The Act of Killing serves to shed light on this book's main insights. Oppenheimer has called his film a ‘documentary of the imagination’, as it is concerned with how cinema is implicated in the performance of atrocity (Bradshaw 2013). However, as Tony Rayns has remarked, ‘the near-total absence of context, either about the historical facts or about the production process itself, definitely doesn't help us understand what we're seeing or how we're seeing it’ (2013: 70). Through its exotic mise-en-scene (involving a bevy of dancers next to a giant fish-shaped structure or before a waterfall) and its focus on sadistic killers, The Act of Killing largely presents the Indonesian genocide as something unique and faraway, thereby distancing its Western viewers and letting them off the hook with regard to their own implication in that history. In the context of the Cold War, the genocide is far from unique; it took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and also harbours many similarities to the events in Latin America covered in Chapter 3. In Indonesia, an attempted coup by left-wing army officers gave the army the motive to wipe out the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).