Nordic Oscar Contenders

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (Denmark, Finland, and Norway 2015). The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar®nominated The Act of Killing (screened at Scandinavia House in 2014), a truly unique documentary that convinced the surviving perpetrators of the brutal Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 that re-enact their crimes against humanity in a series of absurd pantomimes of death.

In The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer returns to the killing fields to analyze the violence from another angle – the viewpoint of the victims’ relatives, who have kept silent about the atrocities for 50 years. The documentary follows Adi, an ophthalmologist who was born just after his brother Ramli was killed by roving gangs of anti-Communist death squads sanctioned by President Suharto. Oppenheimer tracked down the unrepentant militia members who had wielded machetes on Ramli and countless others and who still giggle about their butchery as if it were a mere youthful indiscretion. Adi, showing enormous poise, restraint, and courage, later confronts Ramli’s killers and asks them about their past – all while performing eye exams on them. The Look of Silence, a shocking, utterly absorbing companion to Oppenheimer’s 2012 masterpiece, is an unflinching examination of the moral blind spot that still shadows Indonesia today and obscures wounds that have yet to heal after half a century.