When Sukarno was overthrown by Suharto following the tragic 30 September Movement in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to genocide.
Anwar and his friends agree to tell the filmmakers the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. The filmmakers seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history. Anwar and his friends to develop fictional scenes about their experience of the killings adapted to their favorite film genres—gangster, western, and musical. They write the scripts and play themselves and their victims.
Berlinale Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary 2013
Berlinale Panorama Prize of the Ecumenical Jury 2013
2013 Danish Academy Award for Best Documentary (Robert Prize)
2013 Special Prize of the Danish Film Critics Association - Sær Bodil
Grand Prize - CPH:DOX 2012
Grand Prix (Documentaire) - Festival de Cinéma Valenciennes 2013
Grand Prize of the Jury - Documenta Madrid 2013
Audience Award for Best Film - Documenta Madrid 2013
Grand Prix - Beldocs Belgrade International Documentary Film Festival 2013
Audience Award for Best Feature Film - FICUNAM Mexico City 2013
Best Film - Prague One World Festival 2013
Grand Prix - BelDocs Belgrade Documentary Film Festival 2013
Movies That Matter Award - ZagrebDox 2013
Critics Prize - Istanbul Independent Film Festival 2013
Gilda Vieira de Mello Prize - Geneva International Human Rights Film Festival 2013
Amnesty International Award - IndieLisboa 2013
