The Look of Silence

On Sunday 2 August, Andre Singer, Executive Producer of The Look of Silence and the BAFTA-winning The Act of Killing and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Film Committee gave a Q&A.

Following the 8.20pm screening on 12 June, there was a Q&A with Joshua Oppenheimer hosted by filmmaker Adam Curtis.

The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, which was screened at the ICA for 52 weeks. Through Oppenheimer’s work filming perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discover how their son was murdered and the identity of the men who killed him.

The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.

Listen below to director Joshua Oppenheimer disscuss The Look of Silence with filmmaker Adam Curtis and Adi Rukun, the subject of Oppenheimer's documentary.