In 2012, Joshua Oppenheimer gave us a haunting documentary that challenged former Indonesian death-squad leaders to reenact their mass-killings in The Act of Killing. Now he returns to Indonesia to a family that survived the genocide who confront the men who killed their loved one in The Look of Silence which opens in limited release on July 17th 2015.
For more on The Look of Silence read our full review.
Synopsis:
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.
