Director Joshua Oppenheimer received international acclaim a few years ago for The Act of Killing, a groundbreaking documentary about the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66. Rather than deliver a straightforward history lesson, Oppenheimer introduced viewers to several perpetrators of the genocide, who not only described the atrocities they committed, but even dramatized some of them onscreen. This shocking approach conveys the horrifying reality of contemporary Indonesia, where the perpetrators of the genocide remain in power, having never been brought to justice for their crimes. Tomorrow the Music Box will begin a run of The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer’s companion film to Killing. More subdued but no less haunting than its predecessor, Silence considers the perspective of Indonesians who lost family members in the genocide. The film centers on an optometrist named Adi Rukun, whose older brother was among the many casualties in 1965. In a series of powerful sequences, Rukun confronts some of the men responsible for his brother’s death—not with the purpose of shaming these men, but rather so he might forgive them and come to peace. I recently spoke with Oppenheimer about the making of Silence and his approach to filmmaking.

She called him to the village, and I met this young man who was profoundly curious to understand what had happened to his parents to make them who they are. Adi had never known that every house in his village had lost between one and three people in the genocide. But he knew that something had happened that no one was talking about, and that there was this terrible absence in his own family. He latched onto my filmmaking as a way of answering these basic questions about his country, his village, and his parents. He started gathering survivors to tell me their stories. And then, three weeks into that process, the army came and threatened the survivors not to participate. Adi called me to a midnight meeting in his parents’ home and said, “You must not give up. You must film the perpetrators instead.” And that’s what led to The Act of Killing and ultimately to The Look of Silence.

I wanted to show the viewer what these men look like through Adi’s humanizing gaze. In early 2012 when I returned [to Indonesia] to make The Look of Silence—this was after editing The Act of Killing, but before the film had its first screening, because I knew I couldn’t safely return to Indonesia [after the film premiered]—it was Adi who said to me, “I need to confront the perpetrators, because I think if I go to them not seeking revenge, they will welcome this as an opportunity to take responsibility for what they’ve done. And I think I’ll be able to forgive them, because I’ll no longer identify them with their crime. I’ll be able to separate their humanity from the crimes they’ve committed.”

But there’s also the experience of consuming art, which you seem to value highly. I’ll never forget your filmed introduction for The Act of Killing, where you described it as a “magical” experience. I didn’t expect to hear that, based on what it was about. Could you talk a bit about your definition of movie magic and how that relates to your work?

For example, during the confrontation between Adi and the perpetrator whose daughter finds the courage and humanity to apologize to Adi, we hear—after she realizes that her father was not the hero that she thought he was and that she’d have to spend the rest of her life looking after a man who’d become a stranger—we hear the sound of her children crying outside. I wanted you to realize at that precise moment that she’s also a mother who has children to raise. I took out the sound of the children laughing and playing elsewhere in the scene, when I didn’t want you to think about that. In another scene, I put in the sound of a passing car when one of the perpetrators is boasting about some of the horrific things he did, so you understand that this took place in a society. And in some of the landscape shots, we hear this chorus of crickets—16 tracks of crickets, in fact—that form this kind of symphony. I think of it as a symphony of ghosts.