Dozens showed up at the Bell Museum of Natural History’s auditorium on the U of M campus to watch the eye-opening documentary about mass murderers in Indonesia who, instead of spending their lives in prison for their crimes, live as government heroes and are praised for the brutal slaying of their communist neighbors.

The audience hunkered down to watch the full, unedited version of the documentary, which ran for roughly two hours and forty minutes. According to Director Joshua Oppenheimer,the version shown in theaters in the U.S. was cut down to roughly two hours. Oppenheimer said during his post-viewing interview via Skype that he was glad that the audience watched the full version of the documentary and wished that everyone would watch it in its unedited form. The documentary is a bizarre rendering of Anwar Congo and his associates, all of whom share a love of cinema, as they go around Indonesia sharing their stories of how they killed communists. There’s a movie within the movie that Anwar and his peers make, recreating scenes of their crimes with a theatrical twist, clothing themselves in 1920’s style gangster outfits, military fatigues and ordinary civilian attire.

After the movie finished, Oppenheimer explained the history of the documentary and how the focus changed from trying to film the relatives of communists that were killed, to filming the killers themselves. He explained how he felt during the making of the documentary through the use of an analogy. He said that it felt kind of like going to Germany forty years after WWII and finding out that the Nazis are still in charge, still in control of the country and being heralded as heroes.