10 Most Fascinating Films Produced By Brutal Governments

The vicious anti-Communist massacres of Indonesian dictator Suharto were dramatized to great effect in the recent Oscar nominated documentary The Act Of Killing. However what many do not know is that the regime itself actually made a lengthy and dramatic propaganda film in the decades of its reign over Indonesia. 

Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (such a snappy title) was made in 1984 and depicts the events of an attempted coup against Indonesia left leaning president (and predecessor to dictator Suharto) and how General Suharto bravely crushed the coup attempt, supposedly orchestrated by the Communist party. The film depicts the organisers of the coup, alleged Communists, as brutal beasts taking joy in the use of torture and extreme violence. 

The film was utilised to justify Suharto’s massacre of communists throughout his rule, many of whom were in fact just groups of poor, populist peasants. 

These killing campaigns employed young, unemployed, delinquent men who referred to themselves as gangsters and who the government found were easily manipulated into acts of vicious and brutal violence as they tried to prove their masculinity in emulating the iconic gangsters and violent criminals of the American films popular in Indonesia at the time.