The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing. Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide seen in the first film, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The new documentary focuses on the youngest son in the family, an optometrist named Adi Rukun, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film bears witness to the collapse of 50 years of silence.
The Look of Silence debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Prize, European Film Critics’ Award and the Human Rights Nights Award. The film also screened at the Toronto, Telluride, and New York film festivals, and at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Peace Film Award. It is nominated for an Academy Award and for Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Film Independent Spirit Awards. I sat down with Joshua Oppenheimer and Adi Rukun (along with Rukun’s translator) to discuss this groundbreaking film.
Danny Miller: Adi, it’s so inspiring and moving to watch your calm demeanor in the film as you confront the perpetrators of such horror against your family members and so many others. The events depicted in both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence fill me with rage — how were you able to come from a peaceful place instead of being paralyzed with anger?
Adi Rukun: I understood that these were historical encounters — there’s never been a survivor who’s spoken to perpetrators in this way before. I knew I had to honor the sense of the occasion. I knew who these people were from Joshua’s footage and I had to encourage them to acknowledge those things to me and the meaning of what they had done. I knew this central mission would fail if I were to become angry so I tried to be as calm as possible. I was definitely full of conflicting, overwhelming feelings and trying to hold all that together and remain calm was very difficult. It was a very heavy experience, and afterwards I would have to spend 30 to 45 minutes alone and in silence.
Did any of your family members discourage you from confronting these people out of fear of any repercussions it might have?
From the very beginning I explained to my mother and my wife that I wanted to meet the perpetrators so that the fear and silence that’s been in place could be exposed — I believe it’s that fear and silence that makes it possible for things like this to happen again — if not to us then to our children or our children’s children. We have an obligation to expose this regime of fear.
Joshua Oppenheimer: The first confrontation that you see in the film, when Adi is testing the eyes of the man who’s in the poster, was a kind of a test for us. Adi doesn’t tell that man who he is. We showed that first footage to his family and they agreed that this film could bring about a historical break of the silence that’s gripped this nation for over 50 years. We talked about how to do it safely which included things like having a getaway car for Adi so he could leave as soon as we were finished shooting, having Adi’s family at the airport during the confrontations so we could evacuate them if necessary.
Wow! I had no idea the risks were that extreme!
I normally shoot with an Indonesian crew, but here I shot with only a Danish crew so no other Indonesians would be exposed to risk. Adi had no I.D. on him (which is a crime in Indonesia) so if we were detained we could get help from our embassies before anyone could find out who he was, and we only used new mobile phones so there was no data on them that could be traced.
But none of these fears of reprisal or danger were ever realized during the shoot?
Adi keeps people calm because he’s so disarmingly gentle and I think I was able to calm down the perpetrators when things seemed to be getting explosive because they already knew me. But it was completely Adi’s choice to confront them — at first I said no, it’s too dangerous, there’s never been a film where survivors confront perpetrators while the perpetrators are still in power, let alone in their own homes! But Adi explained how important it was to him. I realized that The Act of Killing was famous throughout this region because we were working with the most powerful men of the region — the governor, the army generals, the military command, and also the most powerful men in the country — the vice president, national paramilitary leaders, cabinet ministers, and so on. At this point no one had seen the film yet but the people Adi wanted to confront were locally powerful but not nationally powerful and we figured they wouldn’t dare detain us or physically attack us because they didn’t want to offend their superiors who they still believed were close to us because no one had seen The Act of Killing yet.
So you knew you had to shoot the second film before the first one was released?
Oh, yes. I knew that once that film premiered I would not be able to safely return to Indonesia.
And were those fears borne out?
Yes. I receive pretty regular threats through social media, emails, and one phone number I keep alive just to see what threats are coming in. But I’m very happy that Adi has not received any threats since The Look of Silence came out in Indonesia last year and I think that’s because all of the powerful people angered by The Act of Killing, these national figures, probably let out a sigh of relief when they realized they weren’t in my second film!
I think the sequence of the films is so perfect.
Yes, the fact that the first film was so shocking and dealt with the highest levels of power forced open this space for a national conversation about the genocide and the ongoing criminality of the region. The fact that the second film is somehow more “gentle” and less exposing of the most powerful men in the country has been crucial for the film’s impact in Indonesia because it’s meant that it could have a much wider release. There have been over 5,000 public screenings around the country and we’ve now made the film free for all Indonesians to see online, it will be seen by tens of millions of people that way. This film has opened up a national conversation in the space created by The Act of Killing about the need for truth, justice, and reconciliation. In a strange way, especially for people still traumatized by the first film, I think the second film, while not a walk in the park, is somehow healing.
What has been the overall reaction to the film in Indonesia?
Indonesians are now talking about how the lies of the present underpin the perpetrators’ ongoing power and impunity. They’re talking about how those lies are constructed and how they can finally move beyond them. Like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes who says, “Hey, look, the king is naked!” You can’t go back to not knowing that.
And what do you hope foreign viewers take away from the films?
I think if these films are going to be powerful for foreign viewers, it’s not just because they tell an important story that we didn’t know, it’s because through this unfamiliar story we’re shocked by the familiar — we have these moments of terrible recognition and resonance, where in our very bodies we shake and feel, “Oh, this is what it would feel like to be a perpetrator — or the wife of a perpetrator, or Adi’s mother who, in order to survive, was never allowed to talk about what happened to her son and had to lie even to herself about the killings. It’s a common kind of cliché about documentaries that they bring us these important stories from around the world but that’s not what makes documentaries powerful, in my opinion. What makes them powerful is not the shock of the new, it’s the shock of the familiar.
Adi, have there been any threats accompanying the screenings in Indonesia?
Adi Rukun: The film has been screened on every university campus followed by in-depth discussions. When the army hired thugs to threaten screenings, the students have stood up to them and demanded that the screenings take place, barricading themselves in their campuses to watch the film and discuss it. We are trying to face our past and reconcile ourselves with what happened and what it means for the present. These discussions were impossible before. Our experience previously was that if you so much as brought up these topics, especially before Suharto resigned from the presidency in 1998, you could easily be kidnapped or disappeared, so the impact of the film has been beyond all of our hopes and has made it possible for us to talk in a way that we couldn’t before.
Joshua Oppenheimer: I was at an event in Vancouver with the sister of Indonesia’s progressive new Deputy Minister in Culture and Education and she gave a talk about The Look of Silence and said that it has become a rite of passage for Indonesians, a necessary ritual into full political, social, and cultural maturity. I knew about the screenings but I was still astonished to hear this since I haven’t been able to return to Indonesia. I kind of broke down hearing this Indonesian woman say this — she didn’t even know I was in the audience.
Are you optimistic that there could be a real shift in the power these perpetrators still wield in the country?
I’m always optimistic but the perpetrators, their protégés, and their business partners will still not allow the government to acknowledge what happened as a crime against humanity without a fight because it’s tantamount to admitting that all of the wealth and the power of the perpetrators and the oligarchs with whom they do business are in fact the spoils of mass murder and torture and plunder and no one wants their wealth and power to be delegitimized in that way. It will take a strong social movement to change that, not necessarily a violent revolution.