Joshua Oppenheimer
The Look of Silence

THE REVIEW

Adi is an optician. He visits the elderly in his village. Adi had a brother, massacred in the Indonesia of '65 by that Suharto we have removed from history. The one who sold Indonesia to multinationals and secretly took money from the CIA, slaughtering a million and a half communists, minorities, and opponents. One of the many coups orchestrated by the USA.

Indonesia has been somewhat forgotten compared to the disasters in the area like Vietnam and Cambodia. Joshua Oppenheimer has entered this gigantic archipelago to recount that past and that story. He did so with the documentary diptych "The Act of Killing" and "The Look of Silence."

Oppenheimer does nothing more than take the camera and follow Adi as he talks to community members and former perpetrators, including members of "Commando Aksi," "popular" formations tasked with cleansing Indonesia of PKI members. The accusations against the communists: they do not pray and "share" women. Ramli, Adi's brother, was killed before he was born: he feels the need to seek the truth and look the perpetrators in the eyes, deep into their souls. The awkwardness and gazes of the killers are alternated with moments of explosive intimacy with the parents: a mother who still fights with dignity and a father at the end of his life, irreversibly scarred by that pain.

What emerges is the revulsion of condemnation, the impossibility of admitting the horror, the inability to externalize one's moral repercussions, in a game of denials that brings us back to the classic Nazi excuse "we were following orders." Thus, everything is washed away.

In its almost aseptic simplicity, "The Look of Silence" captures man and guilt, returning to the origins of cinema. Simple storytelling, no "filters," acquisition of reality, truth. Entering the faces, investigating the gazes, exploring the wrinkles of life, making the silences of the human void resonate.