When the Indonesian government is overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends are promoted - by petty criminals who sell cinema tickets on the black market - to become the leaders of death squads. They help the army to kill more than one million supposed communists, indonesians with Chinese origins and intellectuals within less than a year. Anwar himself kills hundreds of people and is the leader of the most renowned death squadron. Director Joshua Oppenheimer: “They copied their killing methods from their Hollywood idols. So we asked Anwar and his friends to develop fictional scenes about their experiences of killing, based on their favourite genres - gangster films, westerns, musicals. They wrote the script. They play themselves. And they play their victims.”