"Perpetrator cinema is a new global phenomenon, an unprecedented 21st-century boom in films that deal with genocidal or other mass-killing events by focusing on the perpetrator figure as their main protagonist or interviewee. In many respects it sheds light on the 21st-century emergence of the new psychological-social-political era of the perpetrator. None of these films, however, is based on a direct confrontation between a first-generation survivor and a perpetrator. Even those that attempt to stage this confrontation – such as As We Forgive (USA, 2010), Laura Waters Hinson’s film about Rwanda – eventually pull back from or otherwise avoid its representation. Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous’s The Act of Killing (UK/Denmark/Norway, 2012) equally fails to enable such a confrontation, despite according centre stage to the paramilitary perpetrators responsible for massacres in Indonesia during the 1960s. Oppenheimer’s sequel, Senyap/The Look of Silence (2014), refers to the same historical events as The Act of Killing and partially stages this confrontation, but in representing family relationships, among other topics, it is not based entirely on this format. It differs, moreover, from what I characterize below as a ‘duel’ in describing the extraordinary confrontations characteristic of Cambodian perpetrator cinema, as neither Oppenheimer nor Cynn (co-director for The Act of Killing) are first-generation survivors confronting the perpetrator, and we cannot know the status of third co-director, Anonymous." (Abstract)