The Look Of Silence

Just as director Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act Of Killing, felt like the most important documentary you'll ever watch, its companion piece, The Look of Silence, somehow tops that.

Revisiting the sickening genocide of over 500,000 Indonesians in the mid-1960s, The Look Of Silence is another thoroughly unique examination of the impacts upon its victims, the government, and the perpetrators who still all live in both the spoils (yes, spoils) and scars of its long shadow. And while Oppenheimer's previous film was about about the killers themselves — a perverse and so completely self-exposing expression of a group of mass murderers' deluded psyches — The Look Of Silence is instead a profoundly sombre and much closer look at the killings from the victims' families' point of view: a film so tightly wound with rage and grief that watching it is just as exhausting as it is devastating.

Yet throughout, Oppenheimer's camera still finds gorgeous tableaux of rural Indonesian — and, really, human — life: an abjectly old man repeatedly being bathed, the muck from his eyes brusquely but lovingly wiped away by whichever family member bathes him; giant military trucks hulking through clouds of red dust, run around by children, dodged by precarious cyclists, all set to a soundtrack of crickets and otherwise deafening silence. This is just an unmissable film.