Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence is the impressive companion piece to The Act of Killing, which won over 60 awards around the world. Both films open up space and time for the perpetrators of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide to look at themselves anew, exposing their fractured humanity to their families, neighbours and the world. In The Look of Silence a family of survivors discovers not only how their son was murdered, but as well the identities of his killers. This award-winning documentary focuses on the family's youngest son Adi, who makes possible the seemingly impossible: breaking fifty years of visible blindness and audible muteness.

Oppenheimer's sincerity, dedication and compassion enables The Look of Silence to be an unforgettable journey into and outside our own individual conscience; our uniting, as well as alienating, national and international social conscience. The result is a most genuine poem about Adi's dedication to break a detrimental silence, thereby exposing one of the most horrible atrocities in the 20th century, while asking nothing less than what it means to be human, what it means to fear and to be guilty.

How does The Look of Silence relate to your last award-winning documentary The Act of Killing? Why have you started this extensive and arguably dangerous project and what has changed since these two documentaries have been released?

Joshua Oppenheimer: The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing are companion pieces that complete one another, forming a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts – at least this is what I hoped to achieve. These two films explore complementary aspects of present day impunity. I first went to Indonesia for a different reason, but I found myself in a village of survivors who were living in fear and under deplorable conditions. They were afraid, as their parents and grandparents had been killed in the genocide of 1965 and feared, as the perpetrators were still in power, that this could happen to them again at any point in time. I had this awful feeling about the situation that I had stumbled upon, so I started working with the survivors, while the army threatened them to not participate in the filming. However, they suggested that I should film the perpetrators instead. When I started filming them, I discovered that they were boastful, pretending to be proud of what they had done. At first I believed that they were actually proud, but then I realized that this was just a defence mechanism. I had this awful feeling at some point, in fact during a scene which can be found in The Look of Silence, in which two men take me down to a river, taking turns playing a different perpetrator, demonstrating how they killed, giving the illusion to be proud of what they had done. I felt as if I was walking into Germany forty years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power. If the rest of the world had celebrated the Holocaust whilst it was taking place, so that ageing SS officers could speak without shame of what they had done to an outsider and that horrible experience with the realization, that this is not the exception to the norm. The situation I encountered isn't some kind of science fiction scenario, but actually the rule across much of the Global South, which led me to stop everything else I was doing and determine to spend as many years as it would take to address this situation. Here I am talking about impunity, which I feel is the story of our times.

The Act of Killing came first to Indonesia, which subsequently opened the space for The Look of Silence. These two films have come to Indonesia like the child in the emperor’s new clothes. The Act of Killing shows the lies and stories that the perpetrators have left everybody afraid, which enabled enormous corruption, thuggery and intimidation. The Look of Silence has come into that space, making visible something every Indonesian experiences and lives each and every day – namely the prison of fear, even the abyss of fear, the guilt and the fear of guilt from the perpetrator, which divides neighbour from neighbour and relative from relative, sometimes alienating people from their own past, which in turn means from alienating them from themselves. The Act of Killing opened the space for The Look of Silence to helped catalyse a transformation in how the media and public talk about their past. The mainstream media now talk about a genocide and a crime against humanity, whereas before they were silent or talked about the heroic extermination of the Indonesian left. However, now the public talks with openness about the present day legacy of the horror, the corruption and fear that I have briefly outline, as well as the ongoing threat of violence and impunity. Due to The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence has received a far wider release, as suddenly the whole country was able to talk about it. Whereas the first film began its life in secret, The Look of Silence has been released by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Human Rights Council. It has screened already over 3500 times. 500 screenings took place on the first day of the release – all public. Roughly a month before its official release, they put billboards around Jakarta announcing the preview screening of The Look of Silence. Over 3000 people came, which was double the capacity of the theater, so they had to put on two screenings. Adi was there and received a long standing ovation from an audience, who could not believe the extent and depth of his dignity and his courage. Both films have shown just how torn the social fabric is and how urgent truth and reconciliation are needed to inspire Indonesians to take forward the struggle for it.

Deception about the past, as well as about the present, is at all times present during both films, not just on an individual, but as well on a collective level. What insights have you gained into the human condition, its depth and limitations, since you started this project?

JO: Maybe one of the most important things I have learned is that the human capacity for evil depends entirely on our ability to lie to ourselves. Every perpetrator is human and any evil act is committed by human beings, who suffer from guilt. Guilt is a powerful deterrent for evil. For example, you know you are not going to kill me now or harm me, because you will feel guilty. Therefore, it would hurt you to hurt me. But if you have been incited by an army or a government to kill someone, then our fear of guilt becomes part of the mechanism of evil itself. We immediately start telling stories to justify our actions, making excuses for ourselves, such that ‘It’s a political killing’, as the government and your commander provide you with an excuse. So if a week later you are asked to kill 50 people, you have to do it and you cling to that excuse handed down to you for life. Since, if you were to refuse, it would be tantamount to admitting that it was wrong the first time around. What we see is fear of guilt. Once we got pushed or are incited to cross the threshold of morality and start doing something that we know as individuals is truly wrong, we fear that our morality can easily become part of the mechanism of evil itself, because we start justifying what we have done, so that we can continue to live with ourselves. When a whole regime commits atrocities, but subsequently wins with the effect of having the ability to impose its own version of events on the entirety of its society, I think what happens is that you build a whole culture around the justification and even normalization of evil. Yet what we see in both films are the consequences of the fact that every perpetrator is a human being just like you and me, that is to say, as Primo Levi put it, ‘There may be monsters among us, but they’re too few to worry about’.