3) The Look Of Silence
Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing endeavoured to expose the senility of evil by having mass murderers gleefully reenact their contributions to the Indonesian Communist purges of 1965. Sharpening focus to that of one victim as he grapples with the past, Oppenheimer’s follow-up, The Look of Silence, is more muted in its approach, but no less distressing.
As Oppenheimer’s subject, Adi, continues to meet with the men responsible for government-sanctioned violence, a wider, willful cultural amnesia comes to light. The Look of Silence is a devastatingly frank investigation into how people and nations deal with self-inflicted trauma, and is presented by Oppenheimer with a historian’s remove, but a master filmmaker’s understanding of storytelling.