The Look of Silence
Joshua Oppenheimer
Through Joshua Oppenheimer's work filming perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered and the identity of the men who killed him. The youngest brother is determined to break the spell of silence and fear under which the survivors live, and so confronts the men responsible for his brother's murder – something unimaginable in a country where killers remain in power.
Image : Lars Skree
Sound : Henrik Garnov
Editing : Niels Pagh Andersen
Sound : Henrik Garnov
Editing : Niels Pagh Andersen
Production : Final Cut for Real
Co-production : Piraya Film, Making Movies, Spring Films
Distribution: Wild Bunch, Esther Devos, 99 Rue de la Verrerie, 75004, Paris / Tél. : 01 53 10 42 56 / Email : distribution@wildbunch.eu / Why Not Productions, Thomas Rosso, 3 rue Paillet, 75005 Paris / Tél. : 01 48 24 24 54 / Email : thomas@whynotproductions.fr
Co-production : Piraya Film, Making Movies, Spring Films
Distribution: Wild Bunch, Esther Devos, 99 Rue de la Verrerie, 75004, Paris / Tél. : 01 53 10 42 56 / Email : distribution@wildbunch.eu / Why Not Productions, Thomas Rosso, 3 rue Paillet, 75005 Paris / Tél. : 01 48 24 24 54 / Email : thomas@whynotproductions.fr
Born in 1974, USA, Joshua Oppenheimer is based in Copenhagen. Oppenheimer has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. Educated at Harvard and Central Saint Martins in London, his debut feature-length film is The Act of Killing (2012).
"The Act of Killing exposed the consequences for all of us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. The Look of Silence explores what it is like to be a survivor in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like perpetrators. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to explore silence itself. The result, The Look of Silence, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken. Maybe the film is a monument to silence – a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows."
"The Act of Killing exposed the consequences for all of us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. The Look of Silence explores what it is like to be a survivor in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like perpetrators. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to explore silence itself. The result, The Look of Silence, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken. Maybe the film is a monument to silence – a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows."