Awakening

The memory of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide

Indonesia, 2019

«We must remember. We must remember, so that these things won’t happen again. It is not a cliché. I’ve seen people getting killed. I’ve seen them! They die because we don’t remember the past, because we forgot everything». – Febriana Firdaus (36)

Awakening documents a practical problem: how a society remembers a mass crime when the public language to describe it has been restricted for decades.

In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. What followed was a vast campaign of killings and incarceration targeting members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and affiliated organisations. Estimates commonly cite around half a million killed and roughly another million detained without trial – in some cases for decades.

Under Suharto’s New Order, the state not only repressed political opposition, but it also controlled the meaning of 1965. Official history framed the period as a necessary response to an attempted communist coup – the so-called 30 September Movement (G30S) – and cast the army as the force that “saved” the nation. This narrative was reiterated in school textbooks, state ceremonies, museums, and mass media, and it was widely popularised through state-sponsored cultural productions, including the film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, shown for years as mandatory viewing for students. Alternative accounts – including survivor testimony – were treated as dangerous, and the stigma often extended to families and later generations.

The end of the New Order in 1998 opened space for research, films, and public discussion, but the limits did not disappear. Anti-communist regulations remain in force, and public events linked to 1965 have repeatedly faced disruption or cancellation. Efforts toward truth and accountability have also stalled: despite human-rights findings and calls for investigation, the state has repeatedly failed to translate them into judicial action. For many Indonesians, speaking plainly about 1965 is still a calculation – of context, audience, and risk.

This work focuses on the people who insist on speaking anyway. Through portraits and scenes of meetings, testimonies, commemorations, and everyday life, it follows the networks that keep memory in circulation – survivors and relatives, activists, lawyers, writers, and informal archivists working outside institutions, often under pressure from authorities and hostile groups. The photographs are about the present conditions of testimony – how truth is carried, where it can be said, and what it takes to sustain it over time.

Click on the images below to see them full screen with captions