The Act of Killing (Indonesian: Jagal) is a 2012 Danish-British-Norwegian documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, and an anonymous Indonesian co-director. The film explores the social significance of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 by focusing on the perpetrators and having them produce reenactments of the killings in the style of various Hollywood genres. The film's primary subjects had been petty criminals, but came to lead a powerful death squad during the anti-communist purge which resulted in the death of an estimated 500,000–2,000,000 suspected communists, communist sympathisers, alleged leftists, and ethnic Chinese. As many of the institutions and people responsible remained in power, those who carried out the killings were never held to account an