"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 p ... sychological-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) more

"Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting ... and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator's typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of "duel" documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment. Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors' moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag's analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator." (Publisher description) more