July 15, 2015

In Joshua Oppenheimer’s searing new documentary, “The Look of Silence,” Adi Rukun, a 44-year-old Indonesian optician, watches a videotaped interview with two former death squad leaders who boastfully re-enact how they slaughtered prisoners during the purge of some 1 million suspected communists in 1965 and 1966. 

Rukun’s brother, Ramli, had been one of the victims of the genocide, having been taken from a political prison one winter night and stabbed in the gut. When the terrified Ramli managed to escape to his parents’ home in North Sumatra, thugs recaptured him and promised his mother they would take him to a hospital. Instead, they dragged him to the bank of the Snake River, where they hacked him with machetes before cutting off his penis and dumping his corpse at a nearby oil palm plantation. 

Like many other leaders of the Pancasila Youth, the paramilitary force significantly responsible for the genocide, Ramli’s killers not only escaped punishment but went on to achieve positions of power within their communities. They continued to regard their atrocities as heroic attempts to rid the country of communist subversives, while the families of victims remained too fearful of violent repercussions to speak out.

“The contrast between survivors being forced into silence and perpetrators boastfully recounting stories made me feel as though I’d wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power,” Oppenheimer, 40, said of his years as a filmmaker in Indonesia. “It’s as if elderly Gestapo officials were still bragging about what they did to the Jews.”

“The Look of Silence” follows Rukun as he meets with perpetrators, confronts them about the killings and tries to get them to admit that their actions were morally reprehensible. But he only encounters threats and fierce denials about any wrongdoings. “It was just politics,” as one interviewee tells him. 

The film also focuses on the psychological fallout for families who were previously too scared to tell their stories of lingering trauma, as well as the American government’s support of the communist purge in the1960s. 

“My goal in this film was to show what it does to human beings to have had to live for 50 years in fear,” the thoughtful, soft-spoken Oppenheimer said during a recent interview at his publicist’s office in Beverly Hills. “It’s about the terrible effects that occur when perpetrators’ lies are imposed on a whole society in the form of a victors’ history to justify what they’ve done.”

“The Look of Silence” is a companion piece to Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary, “The Act of Killing,” in which perpetrators of the genocide re-enact their gruesome exploits: drowning, garroting or slitting the throats of their victims, sometimes in the style of their favorite Hollywood films. But, ultimately, the movie spotlights the dysfunctional psychology beneath all their swaggering bravado. 

“We never boast out of pride; we boast out of insecurity,” said Oppenheimer, the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur Genius Grant, who now lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. “We’re like birds who puff out our feathers to make ourselves look bigger, because we feel small. It’s exactly the same with these men. I came to understand that every perpetrator I filmed was haunted and living their lives in a kind of manic flight from this pall of fear and guilt. It insinuated itself into their sleep and gave them horrific nightmares. And yet they still had available a victorious history that celebrated what they’d done. And so they needed to boast because they were desperate all the time to sugarcoat that endlessly emerging horror.”

Oppenheimer has spent the last 14 years documenting the Indonesian tragedy, in part inspired by his own family’s experience of genocide at the hands of the Nazis. His grandparents barely escaped Germany in the late 1930s and, he said, “I knew the story of the Holocaust even before I knew the story of ‘Cinderella.’ ”

From his father, a political science professor, and his mother, a union activist and labor and environmental attorney, Oppenheimer learned that “the aim of both politics and culture is to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again, in the widest possible sense — never again for anybody.”

Thus, the Harvard-educated filmmaker was intrigued when he was asked to help workers at an oil palm plantation in Indonesia film their efforts to organize a union in 2001.

“On all the plantations in the region, the women had the job of spraying the pesticides, and they were given no protective clothing,” Oppenheimer recalled. “The mists were getting in their lungs, their blood, and then dissolving their liver tissue, so that by the time they were in their 40s they were turning yellow and dying. 

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer

“But when they asked for protective gear, the company hired members of the Pancasila Youth to threaten them and beat some of them up. They dropped their demands because of memories of their parents being killed for being in a union [during the 1960s genocide]. They were afraid this could happen to them again at any time because many of the perpetrators were still in power. That’s when I understood somehow that they were dying not just because of poison, but because of fear.”

After the ensuing documentary about the workers, “The Globalisation Tapes,” was released in 2003, the laborers urged the filmmaker to make a documentary about “why we are still afraid,” Oppenheimer said. He immediately agreed and began a series of clandestine interviews, hiding his camera whenever a car passed by in the remote rural region. “But within three weeks, the army came to the people I had interviewed and threatened them not to participate in the film,” he said. 

At a secret midnight meeting not long thereafter, the survivors instead urged Oppenheimer to try to film perpetrators and get them to admit what they had done. “I was afraid to approach the perpetrators at first because I thought it would be difficult to get them to talk,” the filmmaker said. “I ended up thinking of various ruses to get them to open up. But I found that those ruses were unnecessary, because they would immediately talk about the worst details of the killings, almost compulsively.” Oppenheimer’s interviews eventually formed the core of “The Act of Killing.”

By the early 2000s, the filmmaker already had met Rukun, who eventually helped spur “The Look of Silence” when he told Oppenheimer he wanted to interview some of the perpetrators himself. His goal was to discover the details of what had happened to Ramli and others in the hopes of healing his own family’s psychological wounds as well as those of his neighbors.

But Rukun’s extremely pointed confrontations with the perpetrators proved dangerous — so much so that the optician would arrive to interviews without his ID card. The filmmakers, in turn, would empty all numbers from their telephones and switch cars after each interview in the hope that they would not be followed. 

The ensuing film went on to be even more widely screened across Indonesia than was “The Act of Killing,” which created “an inevitable backlash,” Oppenheimer said. Just a few days after “The Look of Silence” opened in Indonesia last December, the police and army organized groups of thugs who threatened to stage attacks at screenings of the film, he added. But in the end, only some 30 screenings were canceled; the film went on to make a massive impact across Indonesia and — along with “The Act of Killing” — has gone a long way toward promoting human rights reform in the country, according to Oppenheimer.

The filmmaker, for his part, acknowledged that it is no longer safe for him to return to Indonesia, and that he continues to receive death threats from perpetrators who have been offended by his films. And Rukun and his family have had to relocate to an undisclosed area of the country to ensure their safety.

Yet Oppenheimer has high hopes for “The Look of Silence.” “My wish is that anyone who sees the movie comes away feeling like we have to support truth and reconciliation in Indonesia, as well as some form of justice,” he said.

“The Look of Silence” opens in theaters on July 24.