The Bozeman Doc Series continues November 5th, at the Emerson Center with the most critically-acclaimed documentary of 2015, The Look of Silence.
In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, the head of the national revolution against Dutch colonization, was deposed and replaced by the right-wing General Suharto. The Indonesian Communist Party was immediately banned, and government backed paramilitary groups began the systematic killing of all “communists”. Anyone could be accused of being communists and opponents of the new military dictatorship. This applied to union members, landless peasants, intellectuals, ethnic Chinese and all others who fought for a redistribution of wealth in the aftermath of colonization. In less than a year, and directly aided by Western governments, over a million of these so-called “communists” were murdered. In America, the genocide was known as a great “victory over communism” and was largely celebrated as good news.
The New York Times gave the story the headline “A glimmer of light in Asia” and praised Washington to hide its involvement in the killings. 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 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 series will continue with one screening every other Thursday through April. Doors open at 6:30 PM, and the films begin at 7:00. Tickets are available at the door or before the show at Cactus Records and Movie Lovers. Tickets are also available online at www.bozemandocseries.org, where you can also buy Season Passes and 7-film punch cards, learn more about the series, and view trailers for upcoming films. •
