In 1965, following a murky coup attempt in Jakarta, the Indonesian army launched one of the largest anti-communist extermination campaigns of the Cold War. Over the following nine months, between 500,000 and one million people were killed: PKI members, alleged sympathizers, labor organizers, ethnic Chinese Indonesians, and anyone the army and its allied militias decided to label a communist threat. The killings spread from Jakarta to Java, Sumatra, and Bali. Bodies were dumped in rivers. Mutilation was common. Approximately one million more people were imprisoned without trial.
The perpetrators were never prosecuted. Under Suharto’s New Order, many were celebrated as heroes.
The Act of Looking
When British documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer began working in Indonesia in 2001, he encountered a society in which the perpetrators of the 1965-66 massacres were still powerful and still proud. They were willing to talk — more than willing. They wanted to boast. The result was The Act of Killing (2012), in which Oppenheimer invited former death-squad leaders to reenact their crimes in the style of the Hollywood movies they loved. The film is one of the most disturbing and formally inventive documentaries ever made: a portrait of impunity that implicates the entire apparatus of the Indonesian state.
The Look of Silence (2014) takes the opposite approach. Where The Act of Killing gave the perpetrators the screen, The Look of Silence gives it to a survivor’s family. The film follows Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother was killed in the massacres, as he confronts the aging men responsible — armed with Oppenheimer’s footage of them describing how they killed his brother. The confrontations are quiet, methodical, and devastating.
A Culture of Silence
The Look of Silence won the Special Jury Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and won the BAFTA for Best Documentary. Critics consistently described it as the more emotionally devastating of the two films — a work of direct witness rather than theatrical spectacle.
Together, the two films form one of documentary cinema’s great diptychs on political violence and its aftermath. They show how violence becomes embedded in public life when there is no reckoning: when perpetrators are celebrated, when victims are silenced, and when the state’s official history simply omits the crime. The films also show, with extraordinary courage, what it takes to break that silence — the personal cost to survivors and to the filmmaker who enabled them to speak.
The Filmmaker as Witness
Oppenheimer spent eight years on these films. Several of his Indonesian collaborators were listed only as “Anonymous” in the credits for fear of reprisal. The films were screened in Indonesia only in clandestine settings. And yet their impact was real: they contributed to a growing public discussion in Indonesia about historical accountability, and are now considered among the most significant works of international documentary cinema in the 21st century.
The Look of Silence reminds us that the documentary filmmaker’s most important tool is not a camera. It is the willingness to look at what everyone else has agreed not to see.
Find more films that demand historical accountability in the Cinephil catalog.