The Look of Silence

by Joshua Oppenheimer Documentary Competition

How do you deal with the fact that the murderers of your own family remain unpunished? In the 1960s, millions of alleged communists were massacred by paramilitaries following a coup in Indonesia. Two years after his rousing film THE ACT OF KILLING, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer returns to the incident scene, this time to focus on those victims of genocide still living alongside the perpetrators, who were never held accountable for their actions and continue to enjoy government protection. In THE LOOK OF SILENCE, the author accompanies a middle-aged optician, whose older brother was tortured and murdered at the time, around his hometown. There he meets the family of the perpetrator and confronts them with an unbearable truth they wish to know nothing about. THE LOOK OF SILENCE deals with the difficult handling of a past that continues to cast shadows on the present.