"This would never have been possible in the Suharto era," mused one member of the audience at a showing of the film Shadow Play in Jakarta Monday. "As soon as this film started screening, you would have had police walking in and arresting us all."
Four years after the fall of Suharto, the screening by the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents' Club went ahead without interrruption, with Shadow Play providing a very different account of what happened on the night of September 30, 1965 than Indonesians are used to hearing.
Nor were the 300 mainly expatriates who packed the event the only ones to be given a new slant on the alleged abortive coup by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Indonesian broadcasts recalling the events also provided a different view of the facts than was repeated every September 30 night under Suharto, in the late Arifin C. Noer's classic work of propaganda, G30S (Gerakan 30 September).
"Now it turns out we were lied to all those years," said Taniman, a security guard who watched local television broadcasts timed to the anniversary.
For three decades, Suharto shored up the legitimacy of his rule with an elaborate scenario under which the PKI master-minded the attempted coup. Dramatic touches were added: that women from Gerwani, the PKI women's organization, danced naked in front of the six generals who were captured and later killed. The bodies of the six, along with Lt. Pierre Tendean, were bundled into the Lubang Buaya well on the southern outskirts of the city, their eyes gouged out and their private parts chopped off and thrown away.
Evidence from doctors who performed autopsies on the corpses found that little of this was true: there had been no mutilations.
Shadow Play raises the question of the at least 600,000 people who were slaughtered in the weeks that followed. These victims, dishonored in death, remain restless souls as attempts to re-bury their bodies met with resistance from anti-communist elements.
For the first time this year, Indonesia's president did not attend the commemoration of the killing of the generals at Lubang Buaya. Palace officials were unable to provide an explanation why Megawati Sukarnoputri had made such a break with a tradition that was followed even by her querulous predecessor, Abdurrahman Wahid.
The version of the facts portrayed by Shadow Play trod ground mostly familiar to students of the history of the time. It did suggest, however, that the British government played a stronger role than the US government, specifically through the work of propaganda expert Norman Redaway, who pulled the strings of opinion from his Singapore base, even establishing a radio station in Jakarta to broadcast anti-PKI messages that would be easily accepted by Indonesians.
Interviews with foreign correspondents working in the region at the time brought admissions that they too had been hoodwinked by the black propaganda.
And, the film made clear, the overthrow of the PKI suited US and British interests perfectly. With the domino theory possessing the strength of fact in the 1960s, analysts pointed to the risk of all of Southeast Asia falling to communism. The destruction of the PKI made Indonesia a bulwark against the red tide.
Retired senior Australian diplomat Alan Renouf presented the most telling argument why the finger of guilt should point elsewhere than at the PKI. "The PKI were winning anyway, they had no reason to launch a coup," he said.
Totally unprepared for what happened on the night of September 30, the PKI leadership was at a loss. Party leader Aidit told his supporters to continue working as normal and to ignore provocation. The advice was flawed as the military, backed by Muslim militias, began a purge of anyone with any connection to the party, then the largest in Asia outside of China.
Maj. Gen. Suharto meanwhile continued a relentless campaign to isolate President Sukarno, eventually allowing the founder of the Indonesian republic to die unattended in house arrest at Bogor.
It is highly likely that no-one will ever be able to prove conclusively what happened on the night of September 30. Yet Suharto, disgraced by Armed Forces Commander Ahmad Yani over his business dealings at his Central Java command, had good reason to dislike his superiors.
On one occasion, he sent an aide to ask Yani if he could join the Council of Generals, only to have Yani respond in Dutch, "what for, he would not understand what we were talking about".
Allowed to return to a command post at the Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), Suharto had an axe to grind, controlled considerable support within elements of the military, and, without much doubt, enjoyed the covert backing of larger forces that had no wish to see Indonesia turn red.
Indonesia, deprived of any access to classic works of Marxist economic theory that form a major part of the foundations of the way in which economists and people in general view the structure of society, remains a fertile ground for the spread of socialism, yet at the same time, this and other egalitarian systems remain anathema to the country's leaders.
Ironically, it is not the works of Engels and Marx that provide stimulation for modern Indonesians, but Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, which apart from its anti-semitic ravings, also carries a strong socialist message that finds an audience with many dissatisfied with the way in which Indonesia is currently ordered.
With such limited material, any re-interpretation of the events of the past shows only limited potential for a wider debate on how Indonesia should be run.