The Look of Silence

Look of Silence film image

Screenings

2015 Season
New York, Toronto

The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar®-nominated The Act of Killing. Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.
Courtesy of Drafthouse Films   The Look of Silence will open theatrically July 17, 2015.

Filmmaker(s): 
Joshua Oppenheimer
Country of Production: 
Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/United Kingdom
Year: 
2014
98m
Language(s): 
In Indonesian and Javanese with English subtltles
Genre: 
Documentary
Filmmaker Bio(s): 
Joshua Oppenheimer
Director

Born in 1974, USA, Joshua Oppenheimer is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (2015–2019). His debut feature film The Act of Killing was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award® for Best Documentary, and has been released theatrically in 31 countries. Oppenheimer is a partner at Final Cut for Real in Denmark and Artistic Director of the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster in London.

Distributor: 
Drafthouse FIlms
Film Website: 
The Look of Silence film website
Indonesia report cover image

In October 1965, the Indonesian government gave free rein to a mix of Indonesian soldiers and local militias to kill anyone they considered to be a “communist.” Over the next few months, at least 500,000 people were killed. In October 2012, then-Coordinating Minister of Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Djoko Suyanto responded to findings of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) that the events of 1965-66 constituted a “gross human rights violation” by insisting that those killings were justified. Public discussion about the killings, a taboo topic in Indonesia for decades, has increased in recent years, a process substantially aided by the release of the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

To learn more on this topic visit HRW.org