Joshua Oppenheimer on The Look of Silence and confronting killers

Joshua Oppenheimer, the Oscar-nominated director of The Act of Killing, joins Jian to discus his follow-up documentary The Look of Silence. The latter follows Adi, a man who confronts the men responsible for killing his older brother during the Indonesian military coup of the mid 1960s.

In 1965, at least half a million Indonesians accused of being communist sympathizers were killed by gangs of thugs, with the support and encouragement of the military. 

The Texas-born director reflects on interviewing members of those death squads for The Act of Killing, shifting his focus to those affected by their crimes in The Look of Silence, and how he responds to those who say it's dangerous to open old wounds. 

Like it or not, perpetrators are human

Oppenheimer notes that former death squad members, who not only admit to murder but gleefully re-enact and boast about it, are not simply "individually crazy" criminals. 

"We must in the first instance, as step one, acknowledge the basic fact that everybody who's ever committed evil in our history is a human being, and it behoves us to try and understand the people who do this," he says. 
  
Hear the full interview by clicking on the listen button above, and watch the trailers for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence in the windows embedded below. 

The latter has its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight.