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.

Direction: Joshua Oppenheimer

Production: Signe Byrge Sørensen, Signe Byrge Sørense

Cinematography: Lars Skree

Editing: Niels Pagh Andersen

Sound: Henrik Garnov

Cast: Adi Rukun

Original Title: THE LOOK OF SILENCE

Original Language: Indonesian

Subtitles: English

Film Production Countries: Denmark, Norway, Indonesia

Website: http://thelookofsilence.com/

Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/TheLookofSilence?fref=ts

Statement of the Director/s
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 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.

Biography of the Director/s
Born in 1974, USA, Joshua Oppenheimer is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is a partner at the production company Final Cut for Real. Oppenheimer 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 is The Act of Killing (2012). His earlier works include The Globalisation Tapes (2002, produced with Christine Cynn), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998), These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home (1996), and other shorts. Oppenheimer is artistic director of the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film, University of Westminster.

Filmography

- The Act of Killing (159 min, 117 min, 95 min - winner of 72 international awards, including the European Film Award 2013, BAFTA 2014, Asia Pacific Screen Award 2013, Berlinale Panorama Audience Award 2013, Guardian Film Award 2014 for Best Film; nominated for the 2014 Academy Award® for Best Documentary; released theatrically in 30 countries; screened in countless film festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and Berlin International Film Festival.

- The Globalisation Tapes (documentary, produced with Christine Cynn,
2002)

- The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (50 min, 1997; Gold Hugo, Chicago, 1998; Telluride Film Festival, 1997)

- These Places We Learned to Call Home (short, 1997; Gold Spire, San Francisco, 1997)

Awards Won
Grand Jury Prize, Venice 2014. Best World Documentary, Busan 2014. CPH:DOX AWARD, Copenhagen 2014.Best Nordic Documentary Film, Gotenburgh 2015. Best International Documentary, Yangon, Human Rights Film Festival 2015

World Sales:
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Press:
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