Image Credit: Marina Pascual-Izquierdo
Tri Hoang
Read the Faculty Introduction
The Look of Silence is an award-winning documentary film by Joshua Oppenheimer. The film centers on the confrontation between Adi Rukun, together with his family, and the perpetrators who executed one of his brothers, Ramli Rukun, during the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide. Following the success of the 1965 military coup, Major General Suharto assumed power in Indonesia and began an anti-communist purge, which resulted in the mass killings of an estimated number of one million civilians – who were allegedly identified as communist sympathisers, leftists, and ethnic Chinese. Ramli Rukun was among those convicted of being “communist traitors,” and was cruelly tortured to death by the post-coup military. Today, the story of the Rukuns is a representative experience of all the victimised families in Indonesia who have been silenced and who live in constant fear of violence since the genocide. Through the film, Oppenheimer and Rukun hope to communicate “a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence” and to call for support in promoting justice and reconciliation in Indonesia (thelookofsilence.com).
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