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 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. Not all of them

did, but many did. And then to the broader Indonesian human rights community, and everybody

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