The Look of Silence

Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer

2014

*****

How on earth do you top a film like The Act of killing? I consider Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 film one of the greatest documentaries ever made, unrivalled in fact, until now. The Look of Silence is a companion piece to The Act of Killing, a very different style of film that tells the same story from a different angle. Once more, Oppenheimer explores the events surrounding the Indonesian Genocide of 1965-66 but instead of interviewing the surviving killers like he did last time, he goes one step further and films the brother of one of the more famous men murdered confront them. Adi Rukun (not his real name) is the brother of a well-known victim who escaped from the Indonesian police, was horrifically injured, crawled over a long distance through rice fields to his mother, only for the military to take him away with promise to his mother to take him to hospital, only to take him to the river and cut him up into pieces before dumping his remains. Adi was born two years after his brother's death but has grown up knowing what really happened in his country, watching the daily grief in his mother's eyes, dumbfounded by the silence of his fellow man. We watch Adi's children in school being taught propaganda, inconceivable lies are forced upon the children as they are taught a false version of history and are continuously told to repeat it. Adi discusses with this with his children who clearly struggle to grasp the concept of a teacher being untrustworthy and untruthful. As the community's only optician, Adi meets many of his fellow residents, many who were involved in the killings. His questions are subtle and the elderly murders are generally only too willing to boast about the number of people they slaughtered and how they did it. Now and then you feel there might be a glimpse of remorse but for so long they feel that what they did was justified and most as fiercely proud of it. Only when Adi asks more about why they committed such acts do they become uncomfortable. As the film progresses we watch Adi watch some older footage of the killers boast of their kills, including rather graphic details of how his brother died. The grief, horror, disgust and anger in Adi's eyes is about as powerful as cinema gets. In confronting the killers, many of whom are still in positions of power, he is taking a great risk. The film is understandably not without shock but what shocks the most is the way no one wants to talk of it, no one has talked about it and no one is doing anything about it. Adi talks to his uncle and discovers that he was indirectly responsible for his nephew’s death, something that his mother learns about for the first time on camera. At no point does Adi seek revenge or even try to embarrass the killers, quite the opposite in fact, he does to them something that has the greatest effect of all, he forgives them. Adi's dignity in the face of such horror, evil and ignorance is something to behold and is something to celebrate. Most importantly, Oppenheimer's masterpiece has been shown across 480 screens in Indonesia and to approximately 300,000 of its people. A truly astonishing film.