
Bali: Indonesia's Killing Fields
Bali is remembered by most travelers for beaches and temples, not mass murder, but in 1965 and 1966 the island became one of the bloodiest sites of Indonesia's anti-communist purges. This film tracks down men who took part in the killings, now old and living openly in the villages where they once dragged neighbors from their homes. They describe the methods plainly, sometimes with pride, sometimes with a kind of blank matter-of-factness that is more disturbing than any confession of guilt would be. Interviews with survivors and relatives of the dead fill in what the killers leave out: the disappearances, the mass graves, the decades of silence enforced by a government that never prosecuted anyone. The film sets these testimonies against Bali's tourist image, using that contrast to explain how the massacre has stayed largely invisible to outsiders. What emerges is less a mystery than a documented record of impunity, with the perpetrators still walking the same roads as the families they destroyed.