History influenced Jagal (The Act of Killing)

The perpetrators are still free, and that fact is the film's method. Between 1965 and 1966 at least half a million people were killed in Indonesia as suspected communists, and the killers were never prosecuted; several became public figures. Joshua Oppenheimer found that survivors could not speak safely and that the killers would speak freely and proudly. So he asked them to restage their own killings in the film genres they loved, gangster pictures and musicals, and filmed them doing it. The form comes directly from the political situation: in a country where the killings are officially a heroic act, a conventional documentary was not possible, and the reenactments end by doing to one of the men what no interview could.