For the last forty years in Indonesia, we have been watching a shadow play. We have seen the Wayangs or shadow puppets acting out a drama and though we were unable to catch the words, we thought we could follow the story. But now, it is time to peer behind the screen. The terror campaign of 1965-66 was the bloody birth of the General Suharto’s New Order in Indonesia and set the tone for the way most Western governments have dealt with Indonesia until the eruption of violence in East Timor in 1999. Shadow Play is a full and frank account the slaughter of more than 500,000 people in Indonesia, and the period of history that triggered it, as Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, was swept from power. Now, more than three decades later, with the fall of General Suharto, Indonesians can, for the first time, begin to confront their hidden history. The film follows the personal story of the American-educated Ibnoe Santoro who was swept up in the carnage in 1965 and whom we see finally exhumed from a mass grave. But his family’s attempts to give him the dignity of a proper burial stir violent patterns from the past.