Indonesia

Since 1965, a million deaths have been produced. An industry of ideology in the service of the state and political propaganda. The devil to be purged is communism and its representatives, accused of not believing in God and swapping wives. Lies produced by propaganda to "spontaneously" create resentment in the people that would justify violent persecution. Through the testimonies of the perpetrators collected in The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer uses another tool: this time the brother of one of the thousands of tortured and murdered people conducts interviews with the killers, examining the most intimate aspects related to remorse and responsibility. No perpetrator will declare feeling guilty, and some, in their ostentation of the violence produced, will claim that the only salvation from madness was drinking the blood of the victims. All true and documented.

The Look of Silence provokes an invasive and irreversible discomfort. Through the figures of the interviewer's parents, the brother of the murdered boy, a culture is reconstructed, magically violated by absurd and incomprehensible cruelty. The banality of evil does not hesitate to produce industrial-sized monstrosities. The death market consumes life, depriving it of any value that is not functional to the system. The Snake River, the river of Suharto's Indonesia, raised fish fed on human flesh.

Joshua Oppenheimer continues to investigate the relationship between political violence and public imagination with the skill of an extraordinary researcher. The silence that penetrates in the face of senselessness is devastating; the only possible response would be to award the director the highest honors for dedicating to us this disturbance from which it is impossible to divert the mind.

A work of art that does not hesitate to use the metaphor of the gaze and the request for a double gaze, a work that does not allow mechanisms of removal, an invasive virus that cannot be sublimated.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice