THE LOOK OF SILENCE

Directed by: Joshua Oppenheimer and anonymous
Running Time: 98 minutes

How do you feel if one day a stranger come up to your house and after pleasantries have been exchanged, that stranger said that your father, someone you deeply respected, is responsible for killing his brother for 50 or so years ago. That awkward uneasy silence will follow. Thus the title The Look of Silence or Senyap in Indonesian, is a perfect title for this documentary. It is a numbing silence, reacting to such revelation and stories of savagery.

This is not "just" a murder, this is a slaughter that happened in Indonesia in 1965 after the so called regime change and communist uprising (according to the government) happened. The Look of Silence is a stunning companion piece for The Act of Killing. In The Act of Killing, also covering the same historical frame, the main star is Anwar Congo, here there are many Anwar Congo, but with a twist. What if the so called people who comitted slaughter met with the family of he victims?

What done is done, said a supposedly perpetrator. A term we Indonesians always heard everywhere and used in many occasion. But nothing is ever done for Adi Rukun, he himself the youngest in his family. His brother, Ramli, is one of the victim killed in 1965. For years his parents must suffer the condemnation and discrimination felt by relatives of the people accused of being a member of communist party. As if there is a thing called inherited sin to anyone blood related to those being accused. 

Adi, himself a 40 something ophthalmologist, roams the streets in North Sumatra, "interviewing" the perpetrators and sometimes their families. He confronted them with harsh realities. Some of the dialogue are full with tense and awkward silence. Not all perpetrators are the same. Some would deny their responsibility and said that they did the right thing, some would vehemently defend their actions, some dare to recreate what they had done and some has no courage to look at Adi's eye directly. None of these perpetrators have face any law at all. They walk free in Indonesia.

In one tense scene, a family of the perpetrators (the perpetrators himself had passed away), shocked upon learning that their father is a member of the militia that hunt and killed many people, including Ramli. As if there is an earthquake happened in the room. Who to blame? This film clearly shows that even the perpetrator's family must bear the pain.

Filmed with different approach than The Act of Killing and also a stand alone from the Oscar nominated documentary, some of the scene in this documentary seem a bit "artificially framed" but the story is not. It is a real story and what happened to Adi's family, happened to hundred of thousands other families, who decided to just be silent. This is another powerful documentary from Joshua Oppenheimer, produced by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, that shows that there is an open wound that everybody ignores under the saying: what done is done.