Errol Morris sets the scene for the above trailer:
Josh Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing—for which I served, along with Werner Herzog, as an executive producer—is an examination of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66, in which between 500,000 and 1 million people died … [Oppenheimer] identified several of the killers from 1965 and convinced them to make a movie about the killings. But the film is even weirder than that. Oppenheimer convinced these killers to act in a movie about the making of a movie about the killings. There would be re-enactments of the murders by the actual perpetrators. There would be singing, and there would be dancing. A perverted hall of mirrors.
Morris poses a challenging question to Oppenheimer about a scene where the film’s central character, Anwar Congo, watches footage of himself re-enacting killings and subsequently pukes on a rooftop:
Morris: … The vomiting—whether the vomiting is one more performance for himself and for us, or if it is the result of something real. Can we ever know? … I’m left in the end with a question. I know that there is a past for people, but do they ever deal with it, or do they just try to reinvent it or just make it up out of whole cloth?
Oppenheimer: You’re raising a very, very scary thought. It’s so disturbing in some way that it would’ve been hard for me to maintain my relationship with Anwar, if this were an operating assumption. It could be right. If Anwar doesn’t have a past and also has these at the very most echoes, reverberations or stains from what he’s done that he doesn’t recognize, and if the final moment is maybe yet another moment of performance, if he then disappears into the night and we’re left in this shop of empty handbags, and there’s no connection to the past on that roof, then it’s almost too chilling for me to contemplate what the whole movie is really saying. It’s a disturbing thought.
The Dish 