In Indonesian, the word isn't translating as "gangster." It's "preman", which comes from the Dutch "préman", which of course the thing that's "freeman" in English.

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking.

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country.

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions.