The Look of Silence

The Look of Silence (2014) is a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer that you can watch online on iFILM. It is the second film in his examination of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, when military-backed death squads murdered an estimated half a million to one million people accused of communist ties.

Adi is an optometrist whose older brother Ramli was killed during the purge. Oppenheimer's earlier film, The Act of Killing, showed the perpetrators cheerfully re-enacting their crimes on camera. Here, Adi sits across from those same men — some of them still in positions of local power — and asks them, quietly and without theatrics, to account for what they did. He slides an eye-test frame onto their faces while he talks. The responses range from proud justification to deflection to barely contained threat, and each one reveals how deeply a society can bury something it has never formally acknowledged.

The film competed at the Venice Film Festival and took home the Grand Jury Prize. It is not easy to watch — and that difficulty is exactly the point. Stream The Look of Silence (2014) online on iFILM.