The Look of Silence

DIRECTOR: Joshua Oppenheimer   COUNTRIES: Denmark, United Kingdom, Indonesia, Norway, Finland   YEAR: 2014   LANGUAGE(S): Indonesian, Javanese  SUBTITLES: German  RUNNING TIME: 103 min  

SECTION: International Competition 2015, Opening Film 2015

SYNOPSIS

In the middle of Indonesia’s tropical landscape, an older woman sits in her garden, washing vegetables, feeding her chickens and talking about the death of her child. In 1965, her oldest son Ramli was brutally attacked after being accused of being a communist. He was able to escape back to her but the next day his murderers finished off their work with machetes.

Over a million people were killed in nightly massacres that lasted for months after Indonesia’s military coup. Joshua Oppenheimer has already made a documentary, THE ACT OF KILLING, about the perpetrators who have never atoned for their crimes and till today show no signs of remorse that what they did was wrong. They are proud and consider themselves film stars, re-enacting the murders for the camera. This time, Oppenheimer films the victims. With Adi, Ramli’s younger brother, he visits the murderers and their families, confronting them with their sadistic acts, asking them about conscience and feelings of guilt. But the men who see the mothers every day in the village show no emotion.

Oppenheimer documents the cruelty of a never-examined collective crime and gives space to individual mourning.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER
Born in Texas, USA in 1974, Joshua Oppenheimer was educated at Harvard and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. For over a decade he has focused on militias, death squads and their victims in his multi-award-winning short and documentary films. THE ACT OF KILLING screened in the Berlinale Panorama in 2013 where it won the Audience Award. The film garnered worldwide attention and won prizes including the 2013 European Film Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. Alongside his work as a filmmaker, he used to work for the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s “Genocide and Genre” project.

FILMOGRAPHY

These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home (1997), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998), The Globalisation Tapes (2003), The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence (2014)

PRODUCER: Signe Byrge Sørensen   CAMERA: Lars Skree   EDITOR: Niels Pagh Andersen

PRODUCTION: Final Cut For Real   WORLD SALES: Cinephil   GERMAN DISTRIBUTOR: Manuel Ewald, Koch Films Gmbh

WEBSITE
http://thelookofsilence.com/