The Look of Silence is documentarist Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful follow-up (and companion piece)to the BAFTA-winning (and Oscar nominate) The Act of Killing. Both films explore the death squads active in 1965-66 in Indonesia,who viciously killed more than 500,000 people in what they presented as an anti-communist purge.
While The Act of Killing explored the dehumanising effects of on the people who committed the atrocities, in The Look of Silence Oppenheimer turns his focus to the families of the victims. Revealing brutally frank interview footage of the perpetrators of the genocide to a family of survivors, Oppenheimer records their reactions to the the identities of the killers and details of their son’s murder.
After fifty years of unvoiced grief,The Look of Silence navigates the atrocious cruelty, survivor guilt and the mechanics of anger and trauma which his subjects now face.
A fitting follow-up toThe Act of Killing, this is documentary filmmaking with composure, dignity and true human insight.