Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his extraordinary documentary The Act of Killing focuses on a village optometrist who confronts the former right-wing paramilitaries who murdered his brother during Indonesia's anti-communist purges of the 1960s.
Joshua Oppenheimer's new documentary about the 1960s Indonesian mass murders of hundreds of thousands of putative communists serves as a powerful second part to his stunning 2012 film, The Act of Killing.
That film is a merciless high-concept documentary in which the former killers, immune from prosecution and celebrated in the community, used genre films and props to dramatize the crimes they committed.
The new film presents the more familiar victims' perspective as we follow one Indonesian man, an optometrist named Adi in his early 40s, who sets out to find the truth about the savage killing of his older brother, Ramli.
The stories the perpetrators tell are hideous, but Adi proves to be a calm and unrelenting interrogator, even in the face of direct death threats.
Scenes of his children, who are taught genocide-justifying propaganda in school, and his parents, caught between traumatic memories and dementia, remind us how deeply the wound is still felt.
Liam Lacey