“The Act of Killing is extraordinary — there’s nothing like it — and The Look of Silence is, to me, even better than The Act of Killing,” Errol Morris recently told us. “I think it’s a remarkable film. I’ve called [Joshua Oppenheimer] ‘the new Bresson,’ and I mean it. There’s something quiet and powerful and simple about that movie. It’s one of the most elegant, one of the most emotionally powerful films I’ve ever seen.” We’ll now have a chance to see the results shortly as Drafthouse Films will release it in July and for the occasion, they’ve delivered the U.S. trailer.
We said in our review from Venice, “When sitting down to watch The Look of Silence you’re struck by how quickly you can slip back into the particular brand of uncomfortable captured by its predecessor. The laughs, the jarringly playful recounting, the unblinking eye of the camera – it’s like a nightmare you find waiting for you when you go back to sleep, astonishingly unchanged. And yet it only takes a few minutes to fully comprehend how The Look of Silence is complementing and expanding the subject, and why Oppenheimer is not letting this go.” Check out the gripping, new, and quote-filled trailer below.
The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar®-nominated The Act Of Killing. Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.
The Look of Silence arrives on July 17th.