D
Deleted member 28740
Does acknowledgement of harm by perpetrators help healing?
Important documentary film, part of the interview is below:
(democracy now!.org Mon 8/3)
… And then, of course, there’s this other layer of meaning, because it follows one survivor of the killings, Adi Rukun, the main character in the film, as he goes and visits the men who killed his brother, still in power, and tries to get them to take responsibility for what they’ve done, while testing their eyes. And so emerges—he’s an optometrist. And so emerges this kind of metaphor for blindness, which was also there for me in the title. The men are willfully blind to the meaning of what they’ve done, and he’s trying to help them see.
AMY GOODMAN: His father is also a key figure in your film, though he is not really speaking.
JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, he becomes—in fact, it was part of how Adi persuaded me that we ought to film, that we ought to confront the perpetrators. When I said, "No, it’s not possible," Adi showed me a—"because it’s too dangerous," Adi showed me a scene that he shot with a small camera I had given him to use as a kind of notebook to look for images that might inspire the making of this film a couple years earlier. And he showed me this scene where his father is lost in his own home. It’s the only scene in the film that Adi shot.
He’s crawling through his own home, lost, calling for help. And Adi told me that—thinking he’s in a stranger’s house and could be beaten up. And Adi told me that his father—that, essentially, his father had forgotten the son whose murder destroyed his life and his family’s life, but he hadn’t forgotten the fear. He’s trapped in a kind of prison of fear, because he can’t—and he’ll never be able to heal, because he can’t remember what happened. He’ll never be able to work through it. He’ll never be able to move beyond it. And so he’s like a man locked in a room, who can’t find the door even, let alone the key. And he said to me, "You see, if I can only meet the perpetrators, they will—and if they can accept what they’ve done is wrong, and I could forgive them, then my children will not have to grow up afraid of their neighbors."
And I understood two things then. I understood that the perpetrators won’t apologize. In The Act of Killing, I worked for five years with the main character, Anwar Congo, and at the end of that process, he’s retching over his own guilt, but he’s still, in the uncut version of the film, the so-called director’s—what’s out in the United States on Netflix as the director’s cut, but which is the version that came out in Indonesia and around the world outside the United States, while he’s retching, he’s still saying—he’s still saying, "My conscience told me they had to be killed." He’s still lying to himself. And I had this feeling that if Anwar, after five years, even while he’s retching, can’t admit what he did was wrong, somehow these men will not get there in an hour and a half with Adi, the men Adi wants to meet. So I realized that we wouldn’t get the apology. But if I could show the human—complex human reactions that are inevitable when you go into someone’s home and say, "You’ve killed my brother. Can you take responsibility?"—the shame, the guilt, the fear of their own guilt, and then the defensiveness, the anger, the threats—if I can show that, then I can show, essentially, the previously invisible abyss dividing every Indonesian from each other.
And I also realized, from this clip that Adi showed me of his father, that this must be much more than just a film about impunity and survivors living side by side with perpetrators who are still in power. It must also be a kind of poem about memory and oblivion, about—a poem composed in perhaps in memoriam to all that’s destroyed, not just the dead, who can’t be wakened, but the lives that have been destroyed by 50 years of fear and silence that can never be made whole again.
Important documentary film, part of the interview is below:
(democracy now!.org Mon 8/3)
… And then, of course, there’s this other layer of meaning, because it follows one survivor of the killings, Adi Rukun, the main character in the film, as he goes and visits the men who killed his brother, still in power, and tries to get them to take responsibility for what they’ve done, while testing their eyes. And so emerges—he’s an optometrist. And so emerges this kind of metaphor for blindness, which was also there for me in the title. The men are willfully blind to the meaning of what they’ve done, and he’s trying to help them see.
AMY GOODMAN: His father is also a key figure in your film, though he is not really speaking.
JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, he becomes—in fact, it was part of how Adi persuaded me that we ought to film, that we ought to confront the perpetrators. When I said, "No, it’s not possible," Adi showed me a—"because it’s too dangerous," Adi showed me a scene that he shot with a small camera I had given him to use as a kind of notebook to look for images that might inspire the making of this film a couple years earlier. And he showed me this scene where his father is lost in his own home. It’s the only scene in the film that Adi shot.
He’s crawling through his own home, lost, calling for help. And Adi told me that—thinking he’s in a stranger’s house and could be beaten up. And Adi told me that his father—that, essentially, his father had forgotten the son whose murder destroyed his life and his family’s life, but he hadn’t forgotten the fear. He’s trapped in a kind of prison of fear, because he can’t—and he’ll never be able to heal, because he can’t remember what happened. He’ll never be able to work through it. He’ll never be able to move beyond it. And so he’s like a man locked in a room, who can’t find the door even, let alone the key. And he said to me, "You see, if I can only meet the perpetrators, they will—and if they can accept what they’ve done is wrong, and I could forgive them, then my children will not have to grow up afraid of their neighbors."
And I understood two things then. I understood that the perpetrators won’t apologize. In The Act of Killing, I worked for five years with the main character, Anwar Congo, and at the end of that process, he’s retching over his own guilt, but he’s still, in the uncut version of the film, the so-called director’s—what’s out in the United States on Netflix as the director’s cut, but which is the version that came out in Indonesia and around the world outside the United States, while he’s retching, he’s still saying—he’s still saying, "My conscience told me they had to be killed." He’s still lying to himself. And I had this feeling that if Anwar, after five years, even while he’s retching, can’t admit what he did was wrong, somehow these men will not get there in an hour and a half with Adi, the men Adi wants to meet. So I realized that we wouldn’t get the apology. But if I could show the human—complex human reactions that are inevitable when you go into someone’s home and say, "You’ve killed my brother. Can you take responsibility?"—the shame, the guilt, the fear of their own guilt, and then the defensiveness, the anger, the threats—if I can show that, then I can show, essentially, the previously invisible abyss dividing every Indonesian from each other.
And I also realized, from this clip that Adi showed me of his father, that this must be much more than just a film about impunity and survivors living side by side with perpetrators who are still in power. It must also be a kind of poem about memory and oblivion, about—a poem composed in perhaps in memoriam to all that’s destroyed, not just the dead, who can’t be wakened, but the lives that have been destroyed by 50 years of fear and silence that can never be made whole again.
