“Luckily, I drank blood. If not, I’d be crazy, calling to prayer from the trees,” says Inong, a thin, old man in a knitted skull cap. “If you drink blood, you can do anything! Salty and sweet. Human blood.”

The seventy-two-year-old is the former leader of a village death squad in The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated documentary, a companion piece to his 2012 The Act of Killing about the 1965-66 political massacre in Indonesia. A number of the killers interviewed in The Look of Silence mention the same superstition—that drinking their victims’ blood kept them from going mad—an assertion suggestive not of cognitive dissonance so much as a cognitive concerto for sledgehammers.

As many as a million alleged Communists, perhaps more, were murdered by Inong and gangsters like him, at the secret direction of the military dictatorship led by Suharto. In the fifty years since, no one has ever been punished, and despite promises of human rights reform from the current regime there’s been, as yet, no widespread effort at a national reconciliation.

“Everything is safe now,” Inong says. “The past is past.”

He is talking to Adi Rukun, a soft-spoken North Sumatran optometrist, a youthful forty-five, clean-shaven and polite, who has been testing and fitting him for eyeglasses. In 1965 Rukun’s older brother Ramli, then the twenty-five-year-old leader of a farmers’ cooperative, was tortured, then kidnapped after his escape, tortured again, and finally killed by Inong and several others. In the end they cut off his penis, and threw him in the river.

The optometrist asks about the killings carefully, slowly, revealing his own identity a bit at a time as he works. Rukun will go on in the film to confront several of the men who participated in his brother’s murder, a number of whom have remained in power as local officials ever since.

“Something disturbs me,” Rukun says to Inong. It’s a lie, he says softly, that Communists have sex with each other’s wives; a lie that the people he killed had no religion. “It’s only propaganda to give religious people like you an excuse to kill.”

The old man seems to panic a bit, and then tries to brazen it out. “You’re talking politics again! It’s bad. Joshua! Stop filming!”

But Joshua doesn’t stop filming.

“The Act of Killing has been downloaded and shared tens of millions of times,” Oppenheimer, a compact, pale forty-one-year-old, told me during a recent Oscar press day at the production company’s plush Beverly Hills offices. “I don’t have the latest numbers, but it’s been... explosive. And The Look of Silence ought to go that way, too.” In Indonesia, both films are available to download for free, and it is not too much to say that they are having a palpable effect on the nation’s political conscience.

The director arrived in Indonesia in 2001 at the invitation of a union group, planning to make a film about workers at an oil-palm plantation who were dying, in their forties, of liver failure caused by continuous exposure to poisonous pesticides and herbicides. In response to the workers’ requests for protective clothing, the plantation’s Belgian owners paid a paramilitary organization—Pancasila Youth, the same group that had terrorized them and their families in 1965—to force them to drop their demands. And they did drop their demands, preferring to die rather than endanger their families. Oppenheimer met Adi Rukun and other human rights activists at this time and it was then that he committed himself to expose the hidden history of the massacre.

Despite its careful fidelity to Indonesian history, society, and culture, The Look of Silence may strike the Western viewer as “heroic” in its exposure of distant wrongs: Here’s a sophisticated Western artist, come to shine a light on injustice in a faraway land. But Oppenheimer rejects this view outright, explaining that the impetus for making both films came not from himself, but from Adi Rukun, his family, and the other Indonesian human rights activists with whom he ended up working for more than a decade. These films, he says, were made for Indonesians, and largely by Indonesians:

Adi’s family sent me to film these perpetrators. I was afraid to do it. I... I think they pushed me. They said, ‘Look, you’re here. You speak the language. You have to try.’ I went. I approached them.

And I found they were boastful. Adi’s family and the little community of survivors Adi had gathered to try and tell me their stories... they were waiting to see the material. I warned them it was going to be really tough... Many watched it, and [they said], ‘You must continue to film the perpetrators, because anyone who sees the way they’re talking will be forced to acknowledge that this genocide hasn’t ended, because we’re still living ... the perpetrators are still in power... Millions of people’s lives are still being diminished by fear.’

Gradually I gathered this crew of Indonesian human rights activists, filmmakers who wanted to be directly political, who felt it necessary—the lies are so bald-faced. They’re so grotesque.

Watching the initial footage convinced Adi Rukun that he had to confront the perpetrators himself. He thought that if they understood what they’d done, they would regret, and they would apologize. Finally, then, his community would begin to heal. At first Oppenheimer refused: it was far too dangerous, he said. But in time he came to agree, and then to help.

At the time of filming The Look of Silence, local authorities—including Ramli’s killers—already knew Oppenheimer as the director of The Act of Killing. Government officials who were superior to them in rank and power had approved the earlier project. This provided the cast and crew making the second film with a certain amount of protection, at least until the release of the first. Even so, Oppenheimer and his production team arranged in advance for the Rukun family to be able to leave the area at a moment’s notice—a getaway car was packed, and visas and permissions were ready to go in case anyone was threatened with harm. Part of the production budget went to the Rukuns’ relocation to a safe place far from North Sumatra in advance of the premiere of The Look of Silence in Venice in 2014.

The two films have sparked a worldwide reexamination of the massacre. The Act of Killing focused on Anwar Congo, a gangster who admitted to killing, with his own hands, more than a thousand men, women and children in 1965-66. Still-extant Indonesian institutions have held these murders to be necessary and heroic acts, but even so, Oppenheimer was shocked to find Congo and many other perpetrators of the atrocities positively eager to discuss their crimes. The Act of Killing invited them to reenact and dramatize their version of events, thereby drawing viewers into a dizzying morass of self-deceptions, fears, and fantasies; The Look of Silence takes the next step into a direct confrontation between victor and victim.

Oppenheimer sees himself as providing audiences not a revelation but a mirror.

“My films’ impact does not derive from the fact that they have opened the world’s eyes to impunity in Indonesia,” he says. “[Instead] there’s this uncomfortable moment of recognition, of resonance. A feeling of, ‘Oh, no.’ Because this is also us. In The Act of Killing, we’re brought so close to a man like Anwar Congo... you almost can physically feel him, that he’s human, and you feel ... ‘How am I like a perpetrator? How are we all like perpetrators?’ If only in the simple sense that we all do things all the time that we know are wrong—we’re forced to be complicit with things that we know are wrong.”

In other words, the most ordinary and everyday human denials, obfuscations, and dodges are recognizably like Anwar Congo’s, and it’s a shock to see them pressed into the service of sublimating the memories of a man who’d go see a gangster movie, and then cross the street from the movie theatre and walk upstairs to a nondescript cement rooftop, where he’d be “happy” to strangle a dozen people with wires (initially the victims were beaten to death, but that left too much blood and bad smells, so he and his associates developed a method of garrotting instead, an innovation he describes with evident pride). We watch as Congo, five decades later, is still drowning his terror and confusion in liquor, music, braggadocio, playing with his little grandsons—anything but having to face his own literal, and, as becomes evident in The Act Of Killing, inescapable, bad dreams.

Oppenheimer’s empathy can find rays of humanity to show us, even in a murderer, and conversely, it’s strange to realize that this young American man was able to persuade so many Indonesian killers to confide in him. But in the end it seems the depth of sympathy, understanding, and trust between Adi Rukun and Joshua Oppenheimer is what really made the films possible.

“So many human rights-related documentaries present a far-off problem as they explain the context,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s clearly a stranger’s-eye view. And part of that distance is often about saying, ‘Look at how terrible things are over there.’”

“Far away,” I say.

“Yeah, and the unspoken compact with the audience, which is escapist... I mean: Don’t you feel good about yourself for reading about this, or for watching this film? For taking out ninety minutes to watch this film, and see how terrible things are there. Convincing yourself that you care by watching this film,” Oppenheimer said.

“Absolving yourself.”

“And reminding yourself that you’re good. Exactly.”

A key scene in The Look of Silence takes place in a classroom of Indonesian twelve-year-olds, as they are indoctrinated in the official line regarding the killings. There are perhaps twenty uniformed sixth-graders—the boys in white short-sleeved shirts, the girls in gray hijabs, taught by an intensely focused man of about thirty. “Communists are cruel,” he says; “Communists don’t believe in God.” As the teacher warms to his theme, he begins to mime some of the Communists’ lurid crimes, poking a marker just a couple of inches from a boy’s eye. “Imagine how painful it would be if your eyes were gouged out! Their eyes were ripped out!” Several of the children are clearly distressed by the violent talk, including one whom we will discover to be Adi Rukun’s son. But the boy next to him is laughing, in what looks like a cross between mirth, incredulity, and fear—a species of laughter echoed by some of the killers, throughout the movie; they laugh just this way when they are describing things like the way they cracked a man’s skull open. The way he tried to hold his broken head together.

“So let’s thank the heroes,” the teacher concludes, “who struggled to make our country a democracy!”

“How did you arrange to film this?” I asked Oppenheimer.

“I just asked the teacher if I could film their annual history lesson on the extermination of the Communists.”

The Look of Silence also raises questions for the American viewer of a particularly American complicity. Many reviewers have noted the fact that the U.S. supported the Suharto government, and therefore those carrying out the massacre, with information, weapons, and money. The film touches briefly on this point, and Oppenheimer wrote an op-ed in The Times addressing it more directly. The extent of U.S. involvement, as well as that of Britain, is still not fully known. But beyond this, the parallels in Oppenheimer’s work between our own comfortable, self-imposed political denialism and ignorance and their Indonesian counterparts are hard to miss. “Throughout the year we’ve been reminded again and again of the brutal and completely unresolved history of racial oppression, the ongoing criminalization of whole classes of our community,” Oppenheimer said.

The era following Suharto’s 1998 resignation has seen major political reforms in Indonesia—free elections and a free press, increased regional autonomy and tolerance for dissent—but there’s also been a significant pushback against those reforms from the right. The former general Prabowo Subianto, Suharto’s son-in-law, is a hardliner implicated in the mass killings in East Timor; he has a history of threatening journalists, and drew widespread condemnation for a ghastly campaign video making use of Nazi costumes and imagery set to the tune of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Even so, he came close to winning the 2014 election that installed the current president Joko Widodo. The country’s polarization, too, echoes our own.

The political situation in Indonesia vis-à-vis The Look of Silence is more complex than might be suggested by reports of cancelled screenings like the one at the recent Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. There have been crackdowns and even threats of violence against those wishing to screen the film, but they’ve been rare. Widodo has promised to address human rights violations, Oppenheimer told me. “He’s appointed some good people where he can. And the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council, which are two government bodies, are the official distributors of The Look of Silence in Indonesia. At the same time, the thousands of screenings and putting the film out for free online, and now the Oscar nomination, have provoked, in a way, a backlash.”

“How likely is it that the paramilitaries could gather back up into a single political force again?” I asked.

“I think the films make it much harder for them. I mean, they make their threats in the films, but in fact, the films ultimately sort of undermine their power, because they shine a light. And make people angry about it... and they’re angry in the media. They’re angry in Tempo magazine. They’re angry in Kompas now. They’re angry in... they’re angry across the Indonesian media.”

Nowadays Oppenheimer lives in Denmark, and must find himself both distant from and profoundly connected to events in Indonesia. He still receives regular death threats, including one from a would-be assassin offering to use his head as a football should he dare to return; he hasn’t been back in years. If activists like him and Adi Rukun succeed in forcing Indonesia to look in the mirror, what is the future of Indonesian politics?

“I think there have been—there are really perilous moments,” he says carefully. “In general, I don’t think the movement for truth, justice and reconciliation around 1965, including my films, would be what causes a resurgence of violence, but I think other things could. This is exactly why we made these films.”

Image via Drafthouse Films. Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles based journalist and critic.