“Luckily, I drank blood. If not, I’d be crazy, calling to prayer from the trees,” says Inong, a thin, old man in a knitted skull cap. “If you drink blood, you can do anything! Salty and sweet. Human blood.”

Anwar Congo is an unlikely international celebrity. A former gangster who dropped out of school in the fourth grade, the septuagenerian Indonesian is the star of The Act of Killing, a spectacular new documentary that just opened in the U.S. In the film, Congo admits to killing hundreds of people in cold blood, with a smile on his face. It's perhaps not a surprise that he's expressed some displeasure with the film, but his reasons aren't what you might expect.