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It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, the Heart of Darkness.

There's a question that has been around for a long time. Are humans innately violent?

That is, if you strip the civilization out of us, just how bad would we be?

So first, we're going to talk about one of the most acclaimed documentaries

of the past year, the Academy Award nominated film, The Act of Killing. It follows a former

Indonesian death squad leader as he remembers and even reenacts the atrocities he committed.

Charles Monroe Kane talked with American director Josh Oppenheimer, who spent five years making this film. And Charles, let's get some background first.

And the film is about what happened in Indonesia in 1965. If you remember, that's when the government was overthrown by a military coup, and this was the U.S. back coup that put Suharto in power. But in that process, in less than a year, more than a million people

were killed, a million alleged communists. And to this day, the death squad leaders have never

been brought to justice. So how did Oppenheimer go about making the film? It's really unique. He

did something I've never seen before. He made the film from the point of view of the perpetrators,

not the victims. He told me it wasn't hard to find them and that

they were everywhere, everywhere he went, every street corner he would find them and they were

completely proud to tell the story. I found to my horror, really, that every perpetrator in the

village was immediately boastful about the worst details of the killings, which they would recount

with smiles on their faces, often in front of their families,

even their small grandchildren.

I had this awful feeling that I'd wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust,

only to find the Nazis still very much in power.

I showed this material back to those survivors who wanted to see it.

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