Joshua Oppenheimer

 
It is estimated that over 500,000 people were slaughtered in Indonesia between October 1965 and the early months of 1966.

Paramilitary militias and vigilante groups, coordinated by the Indonesian army and aided by British and American intelligence agencies, were responsible for mass killings in the country’s anti-communist purge. Nearly 50 years later and the perpetrators still hold power and are heralded as national heroes.

In his groundbreaking 2012 film, The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer exposed the impunity with which the perpetrators live. On 18 September The Fontline Club screened Oppenheimer’s follow up piece, The Look of Silence.

After the screening Oppenheimer joined the Frontline Club over Skype.

The Look of Silence follows Adi, an optometrist whose brother was murdered during the anti-communist purges. Throughout the film Adi meets and directly confronts those responsible for his brother’s death.

Although he does not feature in The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that Adi was an important collaborator in both films. “Over the years making The Act of Killing, Adi would watch everything we had time to show him,” said Oppenheimer.

It was this involvement that lead Adi to ask Oppenheimer to help him meet his brother’s killers. “I sat down with [Adi] and he said, ‘you know Josh, I’ve spent seven years watching your footage of the perpetrators, and it’s changed me and I need to meet the man who killed my brother… I need to confront them and see if they can take responsibility for what they’ve done.’”

Joshua Oppenheimer

Making the film with Adi could have been extremely dangerous. “There has never before been a film where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power,” said Oppenheimer who initially refused to make the film this way.

However after their experience working on The Act of Killing, Ali believed that confronting his brother’s killers would help reconciliation. “He though they would welcome this as this chance to sort of be forgiven by their victims families… and to stop this manic boasting which he always felt was defensive,” said Oppenheimer.

“I didn’t realise that he might be right until after I started to film Anwar Congo,” Oppenheimer said referring to the main protagonist in The Act of Killing. None the less he was still sceptical that Adi would receive the apology he was hoping for. In the five years that he filmed with him, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that never once did Anwar Congo consciously admit to himself that he was wrong to have killed.

Instead, with The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer hoped that the meetings between Ali and his brother’s killers would allow him to capture the unconscious guilt

“Maybe if I can film with precision and empathy and intimacy,” said Oppenheimer, “the complex human reactions that are inevitable when you go into someone’s home and say ‘look you’ve killed my brother, please can’t you take responsibility for this for the sake of our children’… then we can make visible the previously invisible abyss of fear and guilt that’s dividing everybody in this society.”

Oppenheimer told the Fontline Club that the primary audience was always intended to be Indonesians. There was an outpouring from human rights groups and survivors that Oppenheimer needed to keep filming with the killers in order to expose the lie that the 1965 killings were heroic.

“[I] felt as though I was entrusted by the survivors and the human rights community to do a work that clearly they could not safely do themselves… and I felt therefore much more like their agent than I ever felt like a foreign filmmaker,” said Oppenheimer.

The release of The Act of Killing has started a transformation around the way that Indonesia talks about its past. “Whereas the mainstream media was once, with very few exceptions, or before with very few exceptions silent about the genocide or celebrating the heroic extermination of the Indonesian left, now they talk about the genocide as a genocide,” said Oppenheimer.

Because of the changes that The Act of Killing have made to the national discourse, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that The Look of Silence released in a much bigger way than would have been possible if it was a standalone film. “Adi came to both [premier] screenings as a surprise guest and received a 15 minute standing ovation,” he said.

The two films have prompted the introduction of a truth and reconciliation bill into parliament. “It’s woefully inadequate,” said Oppenheimer, “… but it’s a great step because it sort of enshrines the acknowledgement that what happened was wrong.”

As well as catalysing change within Indonesia, Oppenheimer is also hoping to pressure both the UK and US governments to openly admit to their role in the killings.

“That’s, I think, terribly important if we’re going to actually stand up against impunity at home in the west, and if our talk about human rights, our rhetoric about human rights is not to be merely hypocritical.”

Joshua Oppenheimer

In this multi-award winning companion piece to The Act of Killing, filmed before its release, Joshua Oppenheimer further explores the terrible legacy of the Indonesian genocide fifty years ago, this time through the lens of one family.

Adi was born in 1968, two years after his brother Ramli was slaughtered in front of many eyewitnesses. Now an optometrist, Adi lives with his elderly parents and his children. Not only does he live under the ongoing rule of his brother’s killers, but he must listen to his children regurgitate the propaganda that instigated the killing, and is still being perpetuated in schools.

Adi decides to confront some of the perpetrators of the genocide, who are surprised when his questions are more probing than Oppenheimer‘s. His breaking of the silence leads to some electrifying scenes, in a film where the beauty of the Indonesian landscape belies the bone-chilling horrors carried out there in the name of democracy.

Radically different to Oppenheimer’s previous film, The Look of Silence is equally shocking and keenly observed. Filmed in his characteristic visual style, the film bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.

“One of the greatest and most powerful documentaries ever made. A profound comment on the human condition.” – Errol Morris

“Profound, visionary, stunning.” – Werner Herzog

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Producer: Signe Byrge Sørensen
Year: 2014
Runtime: 103′
Distributor: Dogwoof UK
www.thelookofsilence.co.uk

The second Between the Lines Festival follow-up event took place at the ICA on 29 June, and was a showing of the director’s cut of the Act of Killing followed by a Q&A with director Joshua Oppenheimer. This remarkable film provides a look at the 1965-66 anti-Communist mass killings in Indonesia from the perspective of the former members of death squads.  Oppenheimer offered perpetrators the opportunity to re-enact some of their murders in the style of their favorite movies, providing a unique and controversial insight into a period of Indonesian history that still remains largely ignored and unknown.

Oppenheimer filmed almost every perpetrator he could find within the North Sumatran Plantation Belt and collected some 1,400 hours worth of material. He explained how he was motivated to understand how these men saw themselves and how they felt others perceived them. If these questions could be answered, he would be able to better understand the regime, its motivation, as well as the perception of the killings in Indonesia today.

The film largely follows one man, Anwar Congo, who, like all the other perpetrators that Oppenheimer interviewed, proudly boasts of the murders he committed, even demonstrating the methods he used to kill to the camera.  Towards the end, after participating in and viewing scenes from his past being re-enacted, Anwar appears to express remorse. Oppenheimer stated that the film holds up a ‘dark mirror, first to Anwar, and then to Indonesian society as a whole, and I hope that we . . . will see ourselves in that dark mirror to’.

Oppenheimer described how scenes were put together: the perpetrators provided ideas for how the scenes would be portrayed and Oppenheimer encouraged them to re-enact scenes in the style of different film genres.  These re-enactments, and the justifications the perpetrators gave for the killings, were important as they began to serve as ‘allegories for impunity, allegories for what happens when no one’s held to account’. In listening to these justifications, he realised that they may actually ‘be a sign that the person is too afraid to admit that what they were doing was wrong; it can be a symptom of remorse…or…a conscience’.

In addition, Adi, another perpetrator, states regularly in the film that the killings were wrong and that the government should apologise. By stating that the killings that he participated in were wrong, he is portraying himself as someone who is tough and can live with himself; he is ‘showing off his numbness’ and lack of conscience.

In response to a question regarding a scene where Adi is shown at the mall with his family, Oppenheimer explained that he wanted to show an image of consumer society that could be anywhere in the world, that relies on devastation to exist:

“We destroy everything we touch, and we’re almost helpless to do so. . . . We’re collectively responsible insofar as we depend on these kind of men everywhere in the world, to keep labour cheap, to keep our consumer society going. . . . We also should remember that the military dictatorship allows Western corporations to break strikes, to seize land – this is the West’s vision for Indonesia.”

An audience member pointed out that in the closing credits, many roles are credited as anonymous. Oppenheimer explained that while Indonesia has welcomed the film, it is still unsafe for the many of the Indonesians that worked on the film – including his co-director – to give their names. It is still very difficult for Indonesians to discuss the events from 1965-66, and Oppenheimer explained that his motivation stemmed from encountering survivors from this period who had been terrorised into silence. He felt that what he was witnessing was too similar to his own family’s experience of the Holocaust for him to not try to expose truth to other Indonesians.

★★★★★ for The Act of Killing in the FT: 'mind-boggling, psyche-boggling, soul-boggling' http://t.co/IpJ6aeykmf Director's cut screening here

— Institute of Contemporary Arts (@ICALondon) June 29, 2013

From the beginning Oppenheimer was in contact with the organisation Tapol and many other Indonesian human rights organisations, who all contributed to the filmmaking process. He acknowledged that the government of Indonesia needs to apologise, before any changes to society can be made. This film has had a big impact on Indonesian society, and has ‘triggered an opening in Indonesia’, where there are discussions about what happened in the media. Investigations are being held and young people are becoming more interested in their history. There is also a movement to recover Indonesian culture, which was destroyed.

Oppenheimer expressed his hopes that Indonesia can go further by holding tribunals for the high-ranking men who ordered the killings, beginning the process of truth and reconciliation, along with developing grassroots political movements to reform the government, remove corruption, and work towards a fairer redistribution of wealth.

Both the regular and director’s cut of The Act of Killing are distributed by Dogwoof and continue to play throughout London and the UK. A list of upcoming screenings and Q&A’s can be found here.

Between the Lines was a three-day festival that took place at Rich Mix from 1 to 3 March. In a series of follow-up events we continue to explore the challenges facing documentary makers, investigative journalists and citizen reporters in the new media landscape.

This screening was in association with Picturehouse Docs and Tapol.