The Look of Silence

Documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer follows up the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing with this companion piece that tracks the journey of a survivor of Indonesia's genocide, as he hopes to confront the men who killed his sibling.

Oppenheimer focuses on the raw experiences of survivors, noting that "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."

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