The Look of Silence

The Look of Silence is a documentary set in Indonesia, where a man named Adi Rukun confronts the people responsible for the death of his older brother during the mass killings of 1965 and 1966. Adi, an optometrist, was born after the violence, so he never knew his brother. His family lived for decades in fear and silence about what happened. Adi travels to meet men who took part in the killings, as well as a surviving witness, and examines how those responsible, their relatives and their neighbours still speak about that period. The killers remain powerful, and the encounters test Adi's determination to establish the truth.

Joshua Oppenheimer directed the film, following The Act of Killing, which had examined the same period from the perpetrators' side; this is the second of his four films to date. Signe Byrge Sørensen produced it, and Adi Rukun appears as himself, with other participants playing themselves and Oppenheimer providing voice narration. Shot in Indonesia and made through a co-production involving several countries, it was released in 2014 and runs 100 minutes.

Viewers have responded strongly to the film. On IMDb it holds 8.2 from around 15,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 7.8 from 326 votes. A critics' rating of 8.8 from 140 reviews places it higher than both audience scores, indicating that professional reviewers rated the documentary more favourably than general audiences did. The wide gap between the two vote counts reflects its larger reach among IMDb users.