The Look of Silence

Through Joshua Oppenheimer’s work filming perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide, resulting in his documentary "The Act of Killing" from 2012, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered and the identity of the men who murdered him. The killers live just down the road, and have been in power ever since the genocide. The family’s youngest son, an optometrist, seeks to bring the past into focus, asking how he can raise his children in a society where survivors are terrorized into silence, and everybody is terrorized into treating the murderers as heroes. In search of answers, he decides to confront each of his brother’s killers. (Festival information, Venice 2014)