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

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

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.

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations because I could document what happened that way.