Abstract: This article closely examines A Thousand and One Martian Nights (2017), an experimental documentary/installation created by the Chinese-Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia for the 57th Venice Biennale, as a form of intervention into Indonesian national history and memory. By threading together readings of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (1984) and The Act of Killing (2012), the article situates Wulia’s work within a complex and hierarchised transnational terrain of competing images, narratives and representations which structure understandings of a history of violence in Indonesia with reference (or non-reference) to the mass killings of 1965–66. I pay attention to Wulia’s strategic imitations of and deviations from the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking, as she intermixes historical events with personal testimonies and fictitious settings. I argue that, in opening an audiovisual space for speculation and storytelling, Wulia problematises both the documentary genre and the international viewer’s claim to neutrality, while offering possibilities for self-representation for survivors and inheritors of the traumas of 1965.