The documentary explores the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 through the accounts of the killers, who tell their stories and also recreate them on film. I can dance on their graves!” Although that’s what it looks like at first, or maybe the dominant image is that. No, I mean in a good way. Was this the nation’s army or the paramilitary Pancasila Youth? We spoke for half an hour about storytelling, moral imperatives, and how these atrocities aren’t so different from things happening in our society today.

Other than that, the government ambassadors around the world have come to premieres of The Act of Killing in countries all over the world — sat in the cinema after the screening — two times I saw ambassadors just sitting there crying after everyone else had left.

I was struck by one of the things you said during the Q & A last night: if I remember right, you mentioned that The Act of Killing began when you learned one of your neighbors [in Indonesia] was a survivor of these atrocities.

There’s also the scene with the fish. If you watch the director’s cut, you see Herman [Koto] become more and more angry as the film reaches its conclusion. [This interview was originally posted as part of our South by Southwest 2013 coverage.

Throughout the autumn of 2012 we screened the longer cut of the film at the National Human Rights Commission in Jakarta. So we cut a ninety-five minute version for broadcasters, which we had promised them, and then instead of having the ninety-five minute version coming out in most cinemas, we decided to make a two hour version, which is a pretty big expense, so the cinema release version was done at the end. The government definitely has noticed this, and not always in the best.

They gathered nearly a thousand pages of this boastful testimony, and they published seventy-five pages, plus twenty-five pages about the film, plus editorials and essays saying how important it is that the country’s on the grip of this in a special double edition of the magazine on the first of October 2012. Drafthouse Films eventually puts their films on Netflix.

OPPENHEIMER:  Although in the shorter film, there’s a bit of a film noir — a film noir that’s been going on later in the film. The editors of the leading Indonesian news magazines and media outlets I think have seen the film as an almost cautionary tale: “My god. And they chopped off their heads and went home every night. It means doing the dirty work for the government, and it means anybody who’s street-tough, who’s unemployed, hanging around on streets, who are very, very oft in an organized crime syndicate, and one word that I thought sort of captured all of that whole sense in English is gangster.

I mean, many of these people were older, so I was hesitant.