Joshua Oppenheimer Made the Must-See Doc of the Summer — and Now He's Getting Death Threats

In 2012, director Joshua Oppenheimer shocked the world and earned an Oscar nomination with his documentary The Act of Killing. The film delved deep into the shattered psyche of Indonesia, where a 1965 military coup led to a mass genocide in which 500,000 people were slaughtered by the government (and powerful paramilitaries) who claimed to be purging suspected communists.

For Killing, Oppenheimer asked high-ranking members of the paramilitary groups — many of whom still hold great power in modern Indonesia — to recreate their mass killings in any form they chose; bizarrely, many decided to re-enact the murders in the style of Hollywood films. The movie led to an unprecedented conversation about the past within an Indonesia that has long lived in fear of its still-autocratic government. Now, a new companion film, The Look of Silence, explores how people are trying to move on and cope with the trauma. Currently playing in New York, the movie opens in LA on Friday and then will be expanding nationwide throughout the summer. (See theater listings here.)

The Look of Silence — which Oppenheimer began years before Killing — follows a young man named Adi, who was born only a few years after the genocide. He was his parent’s miracle child, conceived after the death of their oldest son, Ramli, who was brutally murdered by the paramilitaries. Adi is an exceptionally patient and compassionate man who’s driven to confront the people who killed the brother he never met, but whose death has always haunted him. As he tracks down his brother’s murderers — many of whom still live in his village — viewers discover a country still struggling with its brutal legacies.

Oppenheimer, 40, spoke with Yahoo Movies about his new film, the complex politics of Indonesia, and the death threats he received earlier this month.

Can you break down the timeline of making this movie, and where it coincided with and diverged from The Act of Killing?
The inspiration for the two films was actually a scene that appears in The Look of Silence. In the scene, two men take me down to the river, taking turns playing victim and perpetrator, pretending to be proud of what they’ve done, taking me to the place where they helped killed 10,500 people.

I had waited for as long as possible to bring two perpetrators together because it was dangerous — one could tell the other, “You shouldn’t talk about this with him" and so forth, and it could stop the whole process before it’d really begun. But eventually, I had to understand: Were they boasting only for me, or was it something systemic?

How was The Act of Killing received in Indonesia?
[The first movie] began its life in secret: The first screenings were secret, and only when the media started to embrace the film and break its own silence about the genocide did the screenings become public. The Look of Silence, by contrast, is distributed by two government bodies: The National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council. They put up billboards around Jakarta for the first screenings. It was held in Indonesia’s largest theater: 3,000 people came, the venue only holds 1,500 people, so they put on a second screening. Adi came to both screenings and received a 10- or 15-minute standing ovation after each screening.

Then the film came out about a month later across the country, building on and expanding the same network of community, university and film club screenings that had helped us release The Act of Killing. The second film has come into the space opened by the first film and shown how torn the society is and how urgently truth and reconciliation are needed.

Most of the mainstream Indonesian media, not the extremist right media, has called the film the film of the year in Indonesia last year. The president introduced a truth and reconciliation bill into parliament recently, perhaps in response to the film, certainly the public discussion that allowed him to do it wasn’t there.

So what does a truth and reconciliation act mean?
I think that the changing attitude of the civilian government toward the past, hopefully they eventually agree to change the official history and the school curriculum, and that puts pressure on the shadow state. The military remains formally above the law. So if you’re an army general and you order the massacre of an entire village, you can’t be put on trial in civilian courts. The military would have to decide to convene its own military tribunal to try you, which means that formally, whatever civilian law exists, it doesn’t apply to the military. There’s a shadow state of thugs and paramilitaries who continue to operate with impunity at the request of military dictatorship.

The current bill is woefully inadequate; they decided not to name the names of the highest ranking commanders, which means you’re supposed to have reconciliation without first having truth, and that’s a continuation of the policy of perpetrators essentially threatening survivors into forgiving them, without acknowledging what they’ve done.

When the public is actually able to talk about a problem with sufficient anger and outrage and is no longer willing to ignore the fact that they’re being asked to raise their children in fear and send their children to school to be lied to, it’s actually powerful and dangerous.

Like in the American south, which has different textbooks in many cases than in the north — and casts the Civil War very differently.
Amazing, isn’t it? It’s terrible what happened in Charleston. It provides a context, a terrible context this month to watch The Look of Silence, and see the film not as a window to a far-off country about which they know little and about which they don’t care. Hopefully Americans will see this film for what it is, which is a mirror in which we see ourselves and where we recognize that we can never run away from our past; we are our past. It makes us what we are, it’s always with us.

You’ve said that paramilitary members in both of your films were trying to convince themselves that what they did was right, because they couldn’t live with themselves otherwise. But do you think there’s any sort of root evil in any of them?
These men have to convince themselves that what they’ve done is right — they have to make up an excuse and cling to it so that they can live with themselves. Implicit in this notion is the human capacity for evil depends on our ability to lie to ourself. Why do we need to lie to ourself? Because we know what we’ve done is wrong. So we don’t have to live with the guilt, and we don’t have to live with the torment that guilt can bring. We have to see ourselves through fantasy and fiction — which is really what The Act of Killing is about.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Look of Silence:’

So how have things have changed in Indonesia since The Act of Killing?The perpetrators no longer boast about what they’ve done. You can say the two films came to Indonesia in different ways — they were showing things to Indonesians that they already knew, but were too afraid to talk about. The Act of Killing exposes this regime of fear that the perpetrators have built and the corruption that comes with it, and the second film makes it impossible for Indonesians not to talk about the prison of fear in which they’re being asked to raise their children.

At the end of The Act of Killing, the main person you follow, Anwar — one of the paramilitary leaders who killed thousands of people — begins to choke and have a panic attack. He was struggling with his own guilt. Did you get his reaction to the finished film?
Of course, I showed Anwar the film. And he was very silent, tearful, and then spoke after a very long silence. He said, “This film shows what it’s like to be me.” And I said, “How does that make you feel?” And he said, “I’m relieved to finally be able to talk about what this means.” Anwar and I remain close. During the release of The Act of Killing, we were in touch a lot because he was in my mind all the time. And now we’re in touch every two to three months.

What’s he like now?
He’s no longer boasting, but I don’t think any human being really finds the courage to consistently and constantly acknowledge what they’ve done. Which is why even while Anwar is retching, he’s still saying that his conscience told him they had to be killed — he can’t let go of the lie. And I think that’s why, in The Look of Silence, the hope lies in the next generation. If we see hope, it’s in Adi. He’s a young man, and we’re watching him in these close-ups, gazing at this wretched brokenness that these old men have bequeathed to the society.

How do you maintain compassion for Anwar considering all he’s done?
I never for a second when I’m talking to him forget my condemnation of what he did. And I think that sense of moral outrage is there throughout the whole of The Act of Killing. And the challenge is: How do we get intimate enough with this person so that we start to understand, not in the sense of excuse, but understand the human experience doing this?

I think if Anwar had done this to somebody in my family, it’d be too painful for me to get close to him. Adi is someone who has this amazing ability to separate the crime if the person can acknowledge it and stop defending it. To forgive the human being.

Oppenheimer and Adi at the Venice Film Festival (Getty Images)

Can you go back to Indonesia, or is it too dangerous?
It’s too dangerous. I still get very regular death threats, and I assume it’s from the henchmen of some of the most powerful men in The Act of Killing, or people in Indonesian military intelligence. Either way, it’s people within this shadow state that operate with impunity.

How do you cope with those things?
I get a little scared. They usually come in a conditional form, which is helpful. Like “Do not come back to Indonesia, or else we will play football with your bald head.” And that’s good because I can avoid that — I just don’t have to go back to Indonesia. But you develop a graveyard humor that you hope doesn’t follow you to the graveyard. I receive them through social media, occasionally through email, through an old phone number that I’ve kept alive so I can monitor them. I’ve never received them at home or on my cell phone. So that’s hopeful.

If I got even a fax, I’d be afraid.
Yeah, it’s crummy. What can I say? It’s a bummer. But the sad thing for me is not to be able to go back. The two films are kind of my love letter to Indonesia. And to everybody.