THE LOOK OF SILENCE

Film Info

Denmark 2015 | 99 min. Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

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JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER
Born in 1974 in the USA, Joshua Oppenheimer is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is a partner at the
production company Final Cut for Real. He has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. Educated at Harvard and Central Saint Martins, his debut feature-length film was THE ACT OF KILLING (2012). Joshua Oppenheimer is artistic director of the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film, University of Westminster.

INTERVIEW with Joshua Oppenheimer

THE LOOK OF SILENCE

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.

Cast & Crew

Director

Joshua Oppenheimer
Producer

Signe Byrge Sørensen
Director of photography

Lars Skree
Protagonist

Adi Rukun
Editor (Cut)

Niels Pagh Andersen
Sound Design

Henrik Garnov

Director's comment

THE ACT OF KILLING exposed the consequences for all of us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. THE LOOK OF SILENCE explores what it is like to be a survivor in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of a genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic (if not saintly) protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like perpetrators. But presenting survivors as saintly in order to reassure ourselves that we are good is to use survivors to deceive ourselves. It is an insult to survivors’ experience, and does nothing to help us understand what it means to survive atrocity, what it means to live a life shattered by mass violence, and to be silenced by terror. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to explore silence itself.

The result, THE LOOK OF SILENCE, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken. Maybe the film is a monument to silence – a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows.