Joshua Oppenheimer and Adi Rukun, director and subject of The Look of Silence
The Filmmaker and His Subject Talk About the Oscar-nominated Documentary
Feb 25, 2016 Web Exclusive
A man confronts his brother’s murders. A genocidal general boasts about (literally) drinking his victims’ blood. Children are indoctrinated into thinking it’s all acceptable, and Joshua Oppenheimer captures it all. His unflinching footage of Indonesia’s injustice earned his documentary, The Look Of Silence, unending praise and an Oscar nomination. But the film’s most effectively haunting scene is often overlooked, along with the fact that he didn’t direct it.
The elderly father of Adi, Silence’s subject, writhes and wails early on in the film. Blindness has already closed in on the 100-year-old man, and senility is not far behind—yet another tragedy for a man who had to bury his eldest son, Ramli, after he was killed in Indonesia’s 1965 genocide. Adi films this wrenching moment, with a camera that Oppenheimer had leant him after shooting his previous film, The Act of Killing (for which the director convinced the perpetrators reenact the genocide). Little did Adi know that in filming his father’s suffering, he would compel Oppenheimer to direct Silence, in turn offering his grieving family, and his wounded nation, some much needed closure.
“We’d all gathered for a family reunion, but my father couldn’t remember anyone in the family that day. We were trying to comfort him, but every time we approached him he would shriek with fear,” says Adi, with the help of Oppenheimer translating. Adi goes on to recall how he had brought the camera that Oppenheimer had leant him to film the reunion, and in that moment he distracted himself by using it “as a kind of shield to protect myself. I had to watch him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself, but I needed a shield from my dad’s pain, which was unbearable.”
However, the act of filming only deepened the agony for Adi, who realised that he had documented the day that it became too late for my father to heal. By training the lens on ailing old soul, Adi preserved how his father forgot that his son was murdered, forgot about the perpetrators who went on to rule the country and oppress the victim’s families into silence, but worst of all, he had filmed the one thing his father didn’t forget: the fear that he would never be able to work through.
Adi went on to tell Oppenheimer about his desire to confront his brother’s killers, once and for all. He told his friend and director that he needed to “see if they can take responsibility for what they’ve done,” to which Oppenheimer replied: “Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous. There has never been a film where survivors confront perpetrators while the purports still hold a monopoly on power.”
Oppenheimer warning wasn’t heeded. Adi began to weep, and showed his friend the amateur footage of his father, driven to the brink by fear. He told Oppenheimer: “I don’t want my children to inherit this prison of fear form my father or mother or me, or millions of other survivors. And as a parent I owe it to my kids to try and approach the perpetrators, and if they can just admit what they did was wrong, we can forgive and live together and be neighbours. And my children need not be afraid.”
The footage was so galvanizing that Oppenheimer decided to build a new film around it. The director says that the subsequent scenes that he himself shot of Adi father and his stooped mother, who constantly tended to him, would become the “spine” of the movie because: “I knew that in trying to make a film about what it’s like for human beings to have to live for 50 years in fear and silence, what it does to people, I knew I would need to go very microscopic. That way you, the viewer, would feel that you are Adi, or that his Dad is your parent or grandparent. It was about immersion into this family.”
Aside from the amateur footage, Adi’s plea moved Oppenheimer so deeply that he could not refuse, though he was more than dubious that his friend could convince the reigning generals to repent. In fact, Oppenheimer expected the opposite would occur as the director and Adi, an optometrist, visited one such perpetrator under the guise of an eye exam.
“I expected that Adi was going to be disappointed. I thought his humanizing, gentle regard would make it harder for the perpetrators, and not easier,” Oppenheimer says, adding he thought the killers would “be forced to reciprocate his gaze and see a human being, see that Ramli was a human being, that all their victims were human and all their lies would crumble. Because all that they’ve done is predicted on dehumanizing the victims. So they would panic, become defensive, become angry, scramble for new lies, and in filming and confronting the perpetrators, they would reveal the abyss of guilt and fear that’s driving everyone in Indonesian society. And that would urgently make the international audience long for the truth, justice and reconciliation.”
No such thing occurred. Instead, the perpetrators recounted their grisly acts with pride. And while their words might not have been as immediately startling as graphic archival footage, the impaction of those gory monologues left Oppenheimer feeling all the more distraught.
“It’s more upsetting because it suggests the genocide hasn’t ended,” he says. “The perpetrators are still in power, and through their boasting they are intimating a society into silence, which allows them to get away with terrible corruption.”
That message is finally being countered with The Look of Silence. Adi says he is grateful that critics and audiences have embraced the film, and he is even more emboldened to hear that it is the front runner for this year’s Best Documentary Academy Award. However, those accolades don’t give him satisfaction. They give him hope.
“I hope the nomination will erase the stigma on victims’ families that persists to this day, in Indonesia, and which is taught every day in schools,” Adi says of the Oscar nod. He adds: “Children are brainwashed to believe that the genocide was something justified, that the victims deserved what they got, and that their children and relatives should be monitored for years into the future. I hope that comes to the an end with this renewed attention from the world.”
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