'The Look of Silence' Confronts Indonesia's Unspeakable Past
Director Joshua Oppenheimer on His Sequel to 'The Act of Killing'
Director Joshua Oppenheimer showed and discussed his award-winning 2014 documentary, The Look of Silence, at the U.S. Institute of Peace on July 14 from 2-4:30pm. His film explores one of the 20th century’s deadliest atrocities, still largely hidden after 50 years—Indonesia’s 1965 army-led purge and killing of as many as 1 million people accused of communist sympathies. Oppenheimer’s previous film about the purge, The Act of Killing, was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. This event was co-sponsored by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
The Look of Silence won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. It follows a family that lost a son in the spasm of killings by the Army and allied civilian vigilantes. The family discovers years later (from Oppenheimer’s footage) who killed their son and how. As troubling, they learn how privileged, dangerous and close at hand the killers remain.
The family’s youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, breaks the half-century of fearful silence with an act the film calls “unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power.” While testing the eyesight of the men who killed his brother, Adi confronts them. He challenges them to accept responsibility for their violence. Oppenheimer writes that the film depicts “a silence born of terror,” and “the necessity of breaking that silence, but also … the trauma that comes when that silence is broken.”
Speakers
- Joshua Oppenheimer
Director, The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing - Elizabeth Cole
Senior Program Officer, U.S. Institute of Peace - Santiago Canton
Executive Director of Partners for Human Rights, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights - Ari Bassin, Moderator
Transitional Justice Expert
The Look of Silence opened in Washington at the Landmark E Street Cinema on July 31.
