The Director Joshua Oppenheimer

56 57 JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER

In 2012, a film was released called in which death-squad leaders of the 1965 Indonesian genocide personally reconstructed their killings through surreal sequences and operatic set pieces. It was nominated for an Oscar, won a BAFTA and both Errol Morris and Werner Herzog fêted it as the most important documentary of the past decade. This year, its director Joshua Oppenheimer released , which told the victims’ story in no less transcendental and upsetting terms. Both films have provoked a national debate in , made heroes or pariahs of the participants and stamped a new form of documentary on the world. One which searches out poetic truth with the participation of its subjects: monsters made men, the voiceless given voice. You will never have seen anything like Oppenheimer’s films.

Interview Joshua Bullock

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Photographer © Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Joshua Bullock: So how does a -born documentary filmmaker end up and surrealness of it. We talked about how metaphor and surrealism work making films about historical genocide in Indonesia? in these films, with people who really had never seen a film before, apart from action movies on TV. It was an amazing three months, and it was how Joshua Oppenheimer: In the early 2000s I was asked to train a group of I learned Indonesian as well. The other thing the project did was introduce plantation workers who were trying to organise a union in the aftermath me to the first perpetrator I ever filmed, Sharman Sinaga, before The Act of of the military dictatorship to make their own film about their Killing project had even begun. struggle. It was called The Globalisation Tapes. And while it must carry, to some extent, my fingerprints and the fingerprints of Christine Cynn who JB: The idea of filming the perpetrators of the 1965 massacre really came was with me on that film, it can’t be called a film by me. I knew nothing initially from being unable to speak to the survivors, didn’t it? about Indonesia before. I was asked to do it by the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers and really we could’ve been sent anywhere JO: The survivors said, “Film the perpetrators if the army’s threatening us in the world to film with agricultural workers who were just emerging and not allowing us to be filmed.” Because I’d already filmed an executioner from a period of military dictatorship or totalitarian government under called Sharman Sinaga confessing openly to killings in The Globalisation Tapes which unions were illegal. Colombia was an option, Moldova was an and my short ‘Muzak: A Tool of Management’, I thought it might work. I option. Parts of India that had been under martial law were possibilities. think you see a development from my early shorts and documentaries into But they chose Indonesia, and we found ourselves on this Belgian-owned what is really my filmmaking as I understand it now. I’ve moved from these oil palm plantation in an area of Sumatra where tourists and foreigners never kind of ironies being established or asserted through montage relationships visit. We found that the Belgian company made the women workers do or sound–image relationships to then working with the participants to create the supposedly lighter work of spraying the pesticides and the herbicides, a reality in which those contradictions themselves become visible. In The Act but they didn’t provide the workers with any protective clothing. Then of Killing for example, I meet these boastful perpetrators and they are eager the women would inhale one particular herbicide; it would get into their to show me what they’ve done, to demonstrate and dramatise their acts. I bloodstream, reach their liver, dissolve the fabric of their liver tissue, and they had a feeling – I guess pretty quickly – that they liked being filmed. They’d would die of liver failure in their forties. One of the first things they tried to talk about their past with a strange, surreal glorification. I had a feeling that do as a union was ask for protective clothing. They approached the company, the poetic truth of this would be for these men to make a musical. So, in The the company responded by hiring Youth, the paramilitary group Act of Killing I helped them make a musical. Ultimately one that does not at the centre of The Act of Killing, to threaten and attack the workers. The glorify them at all but reveals the moral vacuum that they’ve created. And it’s workers dropped their demands immediately. a kind of flamboyant fever-dream about escapism and guilt, not a celebration. I asked, “How can you let this go so quickly?” They said, “Well, you see, But I’ve come to create a reality with the people I film that embodies our parents and our grandparents died in the mass killings in Indonesia in the poetic truth I’m trying to explore. In The Look of Silence similarly, 1965. They were members of a National Plantation Workers’ Union, which these confrontations and these eye tests during the confrontations do that. was strong until the genocide. Just for that they were seen as likely opponents It’s a creation of the reality that makes visible these contradictions in an to the new military regime, and were killed. We’re afraid this could happen organic way – a reality that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Adi wasn’t to us again.” Not least because Pancasila Youth was the main organisation confronting perpetrators – could never confront perpetrators – without the to do the killings in this region with the army, and they’re still powerful. film. It’s a reality, it wasn’t staged, it isn’t fake, but it was created because of At that point, I realised what was killing these women I was living with the film. and befriending was not just poison, but fear. They said after they finished making The Globalisation Tapes, “Why don’t you come back and make a film, JB: I found it very interesting that you brought Adi into the fold by showing this time about why after forty years we’re still afraid.” That’s what led to him footage of the killers’ testimony while you were filming The Act of both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Killing. How did you decide that he was your way into the victims’ story for The Look of Silence? JB: Having seen those two films first, T h e G l o b a l i s a t i o n Ta p e s makes for fascinating watching, because stylistically it has elements that pervade your JO: In 2003, after I came back to the plantation workers to make a film work: reconstructions, participation of non-actors and the surrealism of about why they were still afraid, they introduced me to Adi’s family right scenes like the elephant football which bring to mind the giant, operatic away: to Rohani and Rukun, his parents. Adi’s brother’s name Ramli had fish sequence in The Act of Killing. Were those things an early instinct in become synonymous with the genocide as a whole throughout that region. your filmmaking? Tens of thousands of people had been killed there, 10,500 at that one spot on Snake River alone where Ramli had died. There were many other JO: I guess so. If you’re seeing these resonances, it must’ve been. I feel like rivers with similar clearings that probably had similar numbers; at one place one should look for symptoms, one should look for manifestations of a I know more people had been killed. And yet these tens of thousands of problem, cracks in a façade, and the elephant football was a perfect example other people had been taken to rivers, then killed, and their families never of it. Here they were clearing jungle to make virgin rainforests to make way told what happened. Which meant that the relatives and survivors couldn’t for oil palm, and elephants were becoming homeless or being killed, and to mourn. They couldn’t work through their grief, because they couldn’t even prevent that they would train them to play football. I certainly remember the admit to themselves that their loved ones had died. They would say belum discussions about why this might be meaningful for a viewer, why this might pulang, ‘they haven’t come home yet’. They clung on out of respect for the help them understand the perversity of the whole system that the film’s ever-fading hope that they might, one day, come back. And yet they could addressing. I remember we brought a DVD player, and a whole collection talk about Ramli, because Ramli’s grave is in that plantation where I made of films that we thought explored these things. Then, with live translation, The Globalisation Tapes. His had witnesses and consequently was we showed them every night in film screenings. We were screening films irrefutable. So to speak about Ramli was a way to give a voice to some of which would inspire the project’s methods; from [French anthropological the grief that they couldn’t articulate with regards their own loss. Over the From top: A waterfall scene from killer Anwar Congo’s family film interpretation of the genocide. Photo by Carlos Arango de Montis (framegrab); a surreal set-piece of what filmmaker] Jean Rouch to The Hour of the Furnaces, which also has a very decades, Ramli became synonymous with the genocide as a whole. I was Oppenheimer calls the killers’ ‘flamboyant fever dream’. Photo by Joshua Oppenheimer (framegrab); Anwar Congo (right) and fellow executioner Adi Zulkadry (left) in make keen sense of irony about the Argentine oligarchy and the cruelty, horror introduced to his parents and I fell in love with Rohani right away – Ramli’s up before a torture scene in Congo’s film. Photo by Anonymous

60 61 mother. She wanted me to meet Adi, and was saying, “I was going crazy in father, blind, old, lost in his own house. It’s the only scene in the film that he this abyss of fear and guilt that in fact divides everybody in this country, a JB: Where some people and critics have had problems with The Act of Killing 1966, 1967, until I had – as a kind of blessing from God – Adi, who’s a kind shot, and Adi immediately started to cry when he showed it to me. He said, prison of fear in which everyone is actually living, and knows they’re living. is what they consider to be its glorification of a lack of contrition in Anwar of reincarnation of Ramli for me. You must meet him, he looks like Ramli, “My father will die in a prison of fear. He’s forgotten the son whose murder Therefore anyone who sees the film, especially in Indonesia, will have to and Zulkadry. talks like Ramli, acts like Ramli.” She called him to the village to meet me has destroyed his life, and our family’s life. He has not, however, forgotten support truth, reconciliation, and justice. In that sense, maybe we’ll succeed and I met this lovely, kind, curious, whip-smart man, who was desperate to the fear, and now it’s too late for him to heal, because he can’t work through through this film in a bigger way – in the search for reconciliation, where JO: I’m hoping viewers will feel not sympathy, but empathy for Anwar, understand what had happened. He knew the government propaganda from that fear, because he can’t remember what happened. I think if I visit the we fail in these individual confrontations. as a result of my closeness with him. Some people are uncomfortable with school and he knew the details of Ramli’s murder, which his mother would perpetrators with gentleness, showing that I see them as human beings and that empathy, and they then make up other things. They don’t want to repeat morning, noon, and night. Adi would say it was an echo that wouldn’t consequently that I can forgive them if only they admit what they’ve done JB: Dramatically, the contrasting reaction of the two killers, Zulkadry and say that, so they make up other reasons not to like the film. But I usually fade in her mind, but he had no way of connecting them. He latched onto is wrong, they will welcome this as a chance to be forgiven. To make peace Anwar, during the journey into their past and their actions, is powerful and think those reasons are disingenuous covers for the truth, which is that it’s my filmmaking as a way of trying to figure out what had been lost, what with their neighbours, to stop their manic boasting and acknowledge what important. What kind of men did you see them as by the end? uncomfortable to empathise with Anwar. I know that very well, because had happened, what had made his family and country the way it is. they must know in their hearts.” I’ve spent a decade empathising with Anwar. I know it’s hard and JO: I’d say that Anwar is emotionally honest – he’s incapable of fully hiding uncomfortable, but it’s important. JB: While he isn’t the Indonesian co-director credited as ‘Anonymous’ on JB: And curiously, you still had the support of powerful Indonesian politicians his pain. I think he did understand what I was doing in the film. People told The Act of Killing, Adi was keen to help you on that project from the start, who thought you were making a neutral historical documentary about the him about the political impact of the film, but he wasn’t trying to use the JB: How did you mitigate the risk to Adi both during filming and now in when it was meant to be a survivor tale. genocide. The Act of Killing hadn’t come out yet, so you were in the position film as a propaganda piece to make himself look good – I don’t think that’s the inevitable fallout after the release of The Look of Silence? to talk with survivors more freely than when you had tried in 2005 as you emotionally why he was doing it. He was sharing the horror of what he’d JO: He latched onto my filmmaking in search of answers and started started filming that feature. done with me. And I’m someone who – because he is a human being – has JO: We had a getaway car when we were filming the more powerful gathering survivors to tell me their stories. And of course, after three weeks, to see him as a human being, even after he shares those things with me. I perpetrators, so that Adi could get out as soon as we were done and it the army threatened them not to participate in the film. He then said, “Try JO: I talked to my crew. They said, “The production of The Act of Killing think that was comforting to him. He was being reassured that, no matter would be harder to detain him. Adi would have no numbers in his phone to film the perpetrators.” I was initially afraid to do so. We’ve mentioned is famous across this part of Indonesia, because we’re filming with the how awful the things he had done were, he was still human. And I would see – no ID so that if he were detained they couldn’t figure out who he was. Sharman Sinaga – I was traumatised from filming that short little interview most powerful men in the country. Not the president, but the vice president, him that way, therefore the possibility of forgiveness had to still exist. I think Adi’s family was at the airport ready to evacuate if anything went wrong. with him and I thought there was no guarantee that others would be open, the governor, the national paramilitary leader, army generals who didn’t that made him feel safe enough to open up about his nightmares. When he Wherever possible I filmed the confrontations with two huge cameras and it would be dangerous to do it. I approached the perpetrators and I make it into the final cut of the film, ministers in the cabinet, members did that, I started to open up about things in return, telling him, “Yes, that so I could capture the reactions with precision and empathy: the shame, found that they were all open. Adi wanted to see the material. He, then the of parliament, and no one’s seen the film yet.” I returned to Indonesia in gives me nightmares too. What happened, what you did, what you were a the panic, the cracks in the perpetrators’ façade that I thought would be other survivors, and the human rights community as a whole, said, “You 2012, before The Act of Killing had its first screenings, after which I knew part of was horrible.” Yet I still treated him as a human being, and I came inevitable in response to Adi. When I was filming the most powerful men, must keep filming the perpetrators because you’re exposing what happened I wouldn’t be able to return to Indonesia safely at all. My crew said, even closer to him, and I care for him. He had a burning need to share his I felt there was some risk of us being attacked, so I brought only one and in a terrible way the genocide has not ended. The perpetrators are still “Because no one’s seen the film, the men Adi wants to confront – regionally pain with somebody, and to prove that it wouldn’t completely destroy him camera so we could break down the equipment more quickly and leave. in power, and millions of people’s lives are still being destroyed by fear.” Why but not nationally – powerful perpetrators, will not dare to even detain to share it. The horrifying thing in the film is that it actually brings him to a But also so that while we were removing one camera, the thugs who were they’re afraid is obvious when you hear how the perpetrators are talking. So you, let alone physically attack you, because they won’t want to offend their place where he’s almost broken apart by that pain in his final retching. And standing by to attack us wouldn’t be able to pick up the other and beat us I felt entrusted, then, to do this work that the survivors and the human rights superiors who they believe are your friends.” You’ll remember that in The we do see, at least partially, a man destroyed. I still care for him very much. with it and the tripod. So we took risks, and we were afraid, and making community could not do themselves, which is to film the perpetrators. I Act of Killing an Indonesian state television channel produced a talk show to the film was physically frightening. When I proposed that we either didn’t felt like the agent of the survivors, the human rights community and Adi in celebrate the production of our film while we were still filming it. They did JB: Do you stay in touch? release the film or we released the film and had Adi and his family move to particular. I spent those two years filming every perpetrator I could find. I that not because what happened in 1965 was newsworthy; everybody knew , it was my Indonesian crew who said, “Actually we think given met Anwar [Congo, former leader] midway through the filming about that, but because the participation of such powerful men in a film JO: I spoke to him today and we hadn’t spoken in maybe three months. It the change that’s occurred because of The Act of Killing, Adi will be seen by of The Act of Killing, I found out that Adi in his work as a door-to-door was newsworthy. So I went back and I told Adi, “Maybe we can do these was a very moving talk. He was saying, “You know, I was remembering the much of the media and the public as a national hero.” They thought that the optometrist was deliberating seeking out patients who were in their 60s or confrontations, but we have to be prepared to stop at any point. If there’s time you left at the end of shooting, and I said goodbye to you Joshua, and film would be very warmly welcomed, not by the military in this sort of 70s so he could ask them what they remembered of the killings. He was danger, we have to explain to your family what we’re doing before we’ve I wasn’t consciously thinking about what the film was about. I was trying, I shadow state, not by the paramilitary groups and the intelligence bodies and often rebuffed, being told, “You shouldn’t talk about this, it’s too sensitive.” taken any real risks. They have to understand it fully and agree. We have to think, to block out what we’d filmed. But I cried, and you cried, and when policing groups around the military, but by the public and the media. And Sometimes he would meet perpetrators who would boast; sometimes he be prepared not to release the film if there’s any sign of danger. If we do we hugged each other goodbye, I guess I knew I was seeing you for the last Adi probably shouldn’t move – if we could find the resources to adequately would meet survivors who would break down. I understood this was release the film, I think your family might have to move for a while, and I time.” I’m sorry, this is making me emotional. Anwar was warned throughout protect him. He could evacuate Indonesia as a Plan B, or move to another having a real effect on him. don’t think we will get the apology you’re after.” After five years of working the process – by Zulkadry, by the Minister of Youth and Sport, by others part of the country where he would be able to continue his life, see his with Anwar, he was choking over his own guilt; he retches over it at the behind the scenes that I didn’t see – that he shouldn’t be making this film. extended family with regularity, and play the major role he does now in the JB: But for Adi to go on camera and put those questions to still politically end of the film. But if you watch the uncut version of The Act of Killing, But he continued because those people misunderstood why he was making movement for truth, reconciliation and justice that this film has re-energised. powerful murderers must have been a very difficult decision for both of you. in between his two bouts of retching, Anwar says, “Why did I have to kill? it. Zulkadry is an emotional fool, even if he has a Machiavellian intelligence. And that’s what has happened of course. Part of that calculation, part of what Because my conscience told me they had to be killed.” It’s a line cut from He is able to admit that what he did was wrong, because the way he’s coped we did, was to raise the money – almost as much as it had cost to make JO: I gave Adi a camera at the end of shooting The Act of Killing to use as a the shorter version, and it’s so important because it shows if he was faking with it is by killing off his own conscience and numbing himself. Now, there’s the film – to keep five people working full-time to monitor and ensure kind of notebook to look for images that might inspire the making of the, the retching and faking remorse, he would never be repeating the lies a possibility that he has never had a conscience, that that’s why he’s been able the family’s safety. Plenty more people are working part-time in different as yet, unknown second film. I went home to London, where I was living justifying what he did. to participate in the killing since the beginning, even from a young age – he’d capacities. at the time, to edit, and after editing The Act of Killing I returned to shoot already worked as a hitman before the genocide in his teenage years after all. The Look of Silence. Adi had been sending me tapes throughout the editing. JB: Adi never gets the apology from the death squad leaders himself, in much There’s a possibility of that. That would make him a psychopath, I suppose – I JB: Human rights documentaries often set up a situation where we feel When I returned, I didn’t know Adi would be the main character, I just knew the same way Anwar never gives us the apology the audience craves. don’t know the psychological definition. In more common parlance, that vindicated and end with a sense that change has begun. Neither The Act he would be the main collaborator in my second film, or my main entry would make him a monster. But I think Primo Levi is right, that there are a of Killing nor The Look of Silence suggest that hope. point into the survivors’ community. I sat down with Adi and he said, “Josh, JO: I said to Adi, I don’t think these guys will get there in an hour and a half lot of men out there who’ve done horrible things and are numb afterwards I spent seven years looking at your footage of the perpetrators. It’s changed with you. I think, instead, when you come to them, looking at them with as a way of living with themselves. And they’re not monsters. Primo Levi said, JO: That’s right, because that cliché, and let’s call it what it is – it diminishes me. I must meet them. And particularly, I must meet the men that killed my gentleness as human beings, they will panic because they will have to return “There may be monsters among us, but they are too few to worry about. the potential of such films to make change. That’s because it serves primarily brother.” And I said, “Absolutely not, no, it’s too dangerous. We cannot do your gaze. They’ll meet your gaze and they’ll see that you’re a human being What we really have to worry about are the ordinary people.” I guess, most to reassure the audience, and therefore leaves the audience less disturbed, this. There has never been a film where survivors confront perpetrators that too. All of the lies justifying what they did will come crashing down, and it likely, Zulkadry is an ordinary person who has numbed himself so that he more able to let a film go, or leave the film in a state of a kind of enjoyable still hold a monopoly on power – no, we can’t do it.” And Adi said, “Let me will be very powerful because your visage will form a mirror. Your questions can continue to live with himself. As Werner Herzog said when he first pleasure and self-righteous indignation, moved by the heroic efforts of some show you something,” and went and got the camera that I’d given him. He will form a mirror to them in a similar way to how Anwar’s dramatisations saw the film, “These men have escaped justice, but they have not escaped hero who’s on the correct path towards justice. And Adi is, if the film shows said, “I’m sorry I never sent you this tape, but it’s very personal to me.” And, became a mirror for Anwar. For me, the challenge was to show these punishment.” Zulkadry may not have nightmares, and may not realise that anything, totally on the wrong path. He fails every time to get the apology trembling, he put it into the camera and pressed play. It was the scene with his inevitable, complex human reactions with precision and empathy. To show the hollow shell he’s become is a kind of hell on earth, but I think it is. he’s hoping for, apart from the very important scene with the daughter

62 63 of the killer who does find the courage and humanity to apologise. So, if people can let the film go so easily, then they’re less likely to be affected by it, they’re less likely to talk about it, they’re less likely to take action in response to it. Demanding truth and reconciliation and justice is inevitable for Indonesians after seeing the film. And I think it wouldn’t be if I’d fallen back on any of those clichés that you’re talking about. Also, I think they disrespect the victims and the survivors, and dishonour their experience, because they’re there not to reflect on the truth, but to reassure the audience over the singularity of the horror and sadness and injustice that the film has just exposed.

JB: And you haven’t spared a Western audience its complicity in the Cold War machinations and support of the Indonesian junta’s human rights abuses. You mentioned the UK’s involvement in your BAFTA speech.

JO: The Act of Killing opens with a text saying that the killings were perpetrated in part by the West, so that’s something you know from the very beginning. Everything you see follows from that. In fact, the most important details about how the West was involved remain classified, and part of truth and reconciliation involves truth in the West, too. It will mean the declassifying the documents that would reveal what our true role was, whether we were just supporters and champions of the killings, providing some amount of aid, some amount of weapons and money, or whether we were the masterminds and we triggered the genocide. We don’t know. And honestly, we cannot really demand truth, reconciliation and justice in Indonesia without being hypocrites unless we first acknowledge our own role and take responsibility for it, without being afraid of calling genocide, genocide. In The Look of Silence we have a perpetrator tell us, “Look right at me. I should be given a cruise.” He’s essentially saying to me, “Joshua, please arrange a cruise for me to the United States as a reward, because your country, the United States, taught me to hate and to kill the communists.”

JB: After two such soul-rending projects that dig so deep into the darkest corners of the human psyche, could you ever imagine making a film that was purely observational and viewed human beings, not in chaos, not in misery but something that was – for lack of a better description – softer or less involved?

JO: Oh, it certainly could be softer. It could certainly not involve human beings in moments of atrocity. It could be human beings in contexts of joy. But because of what I consider non-fiction cinema to be, it could never simply be observational. I think what I’m interested in, and what I’m doing in film is working with people very closely, very intimately, to take a long journey where, in the overall safe space of making a film, we are creating situations together collaboratively. We’re creating new realities that would never otherwise occur, whether it’s the confrontations in The Look of Silence or the dramatisations in The Act of Killing, in which everybody is pushed beyond their comfort zones. We’re shedding light on the really important questions. If you’re doing that, everybody is changing through the process, because that reality you’re creating is affecting people. So, inevitably, that becomes the drama. The drama becomes that journey, that transformation, and therefore, I think you’ll never see me do a strictly observational film, or what looks like a work of direct cinema.

From top: Adi and his mother, Rohani, share a solemn moment; Adi is an optometrist who seeks to confront the death squad leaders responsible for his brother’s death during the 1965 Indonesian genocides; Adi’s mother, Rohani, stretches her weary body in Drafthouse Films’ and Media’s The Look of Silence. All images courtesy of Drafthouse Films and Participant Media

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