Genocide doc an incredible watch

In social studies classes, I learned about many of the genocides in this often-cruel world. There’s one that seemed to have slipped by the keen eye of history though: the Indonesian genocide of 1965. Half a century has passed since as many as one million people were killed because they were Communists or suspected of being so. What started as an ideological extirpation became a mass extermination, and a brutal one at that.

The scenic island country became a blood-soaked field of destruction.

Documentary director Joshua Oppenheimer first focused his gaze at the subject with the Oscar-nominated 2012 film The Act of Killing. In that, he tracked down some of the perpetrators of the rampant slaughterings and, in good humour, asked them to recreate them as part of a film project. Which they did quite willingly.

It is like looking the devil right in the eye as he smiles at you.

Those murderers are still powerful people in the southeast Asian country, and still hailed as heroes.

Now, Oppenheimer creates the most perfect companion piece by issuing the same frame of reference and channelling straight into the emotional heart of one of the many victims. Through his harrowing footage, one family discovers the identity of the killer of one of its members.

This family’s youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, chooses to find who killed his older brother Ramli by watching footage of interviews with members of the town’s death squads. He does so and asks the man personally and with ultimate compassion to accept responsibility for the murder and for the suffering that he inflicted upon him and his kin.

Adi’s older brother, by the way, was not a Communist.

These two documentaries are unlike any that you have seen before. Imagine a different world where Hitler was still alive and Germany won the Second World War, and some filmmaker comes along to interview him, Rudolf Hess and everyone that ran the concentration camps. Like one of the so-called ‘gangsters’ in the first film indicates, “history is written by the victors and war crimes are defined by the winners.”

The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing are two documentaries that simply must be seen, especially by filmmakers, social scientists and those interested in politics. They are spellbinding and surreal, heartbreaking and life affirming all at once. They command your attention and your mind, and not just because they are subtitled. They show the aftermath of unbridled hostility and how one person decided to break from the psychological pain through a courageous act of confrontation.

These films are not simply films. They are incredible acts of humanity, especially when viewed together.