The Look of Silence

In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist, and in less than a year, over one million 'communists' were murdered – and the perpetrators still hold power throughout the country.

A companion to the Oscar®-nominated The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence portrays a family of survivors who discover how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The family's youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable: he confronts the men still in power that killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to take accept responsibility for their actions.

"The Look of Silence," Oppenheimer says, "is 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."

Join New America NYC for a screening of The Look of Silence and a conversation with the film's director and leading legal scholars and journalists on achieving both the small acts of healing and the large objectives of justice in Indonesia and across the international community.

Follow the discussion online using #NANYC and by following @NewAmericaNYC.

Introduction:

Beth Dembitzer @bethdembitzer
Curator, Social Cinema@New America

Participants: 

Joshua Oppenheimer @JoshuaOppenheim
Director, The Look of Silence

Vasuki Nesiah @VasukiNesiah
Legal Scholar and Associate Professor of Practice, New York University
Former Associate, International Center for Transitional Justice

Joseph Saunders @JoeSaundersHRW
Deputy Program Director, Human Rights Watch

Phil Zabriskie @KillSwitchStory
Former foreign correspondent in Asia and the Middle East
Author, The Kill Switch