Exhibition | "The Act of Living" at KoKi Freiburg
For more information please visit the Homepage of the "Kommunale Kino"
About "The women and the Generals":
The poignant documentary restores the names and faces of the victims of
the Suharto dictatorship. First, the audience is taken into a retirement
home in Jakarta: 21 women and one man live here. In total, they have
spent 211 years in prison.
The residents are representative of hundreds of thousands (perceived)
Communists who were detained in Indonesia during 1965-1968. When seven
high-ranking military officers were kidnapped in the late evening of
September 30th 1965 and were killed the same night, the Communist Party
(PKI) was blamed for orchestrating a coup d’ etat. General Suharto, then
vice-army-chief, “restored order”. In the following months, hundreds of
thousands of so called communists were killed, another hundreds of
thousands were thrown into jails and prison camps.
Suharto held power for three decades and wrote his narrative of history
into Indonesia’s collective memory. This included the false accusation
that the murdered generals were mutilated by women from the leftist
organization Gerwani. The film portrays several ex-Gerwani-members who
were wrongly accused of participating in the murders and who were
imprisoned, tortured and raped. None of these political prisoners have
been rehabilitated.
The film traces the events of 1965 in the context of post-colonialism
and Cold War. Interviews with historians and human rights activists, as
well as historic film clips complement the personal experiences of the
former political prisoners.
For more information regarding the exhibition "The Act of Living" please visit watchindonesia.org
