On Tuesday January 19, The UBC History Department presents a seminar with documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer and a screening of his latest film, The Look of Silence.
Joshua Oppenheimer is a renowned documentary filmmaker and MacArthur Fellowship recipient whose film The Act of Killing (2012) won dozens of international awards and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. Werner Herzog called it “unprecedented in the history of cinema” and Errol Morris said it was “unlike anything else I have seen.” Oppenheimer’s new film, The Look of Silence (2015), is winning just as many awards and earning universal praise among film critics. Both films have had a large impact in Indonesia where the history of the mass killings of 1965-66 remains a taboo subject.
The event includes a screening of The Look of Silence, a discussion of Oppenheimer’s films by a panel of UBC scholars, as well as a talk by Joshua Oppenheimer, followed by a question and answer session.
The event is free and open to students, faculty, and staff of UBC. People who have not registered will be allowed in as space permits at 12:50pm, 2:50pm, and 3:50pm.
Place: Royal Bank Cinema, in the Chan Centre for Performing Arts, 6265 Crescent Rd, Vancouver, BC
Schedule of events:
1:00pm – 3:00 pm: Screening of The Look of Silence
3:00pm – 4:00 pm: Panel discussion (details below)
4:00pm – 5:30 pm: Talk by Joshua Oppenheimer, followed by a Q&A
Attendees will be able to leave in-between these events.
Panel Discussion:
- Dr. Erin Baines, Liu Institute, an expert on violence and gender in East Africa, author of Buried in the Heart: Women, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda(2016)
- Dr. Lisa Coulthard, Department of Theatre and Film, an expert on film theory and violence, author of many articles, such as, “The Violence of Silence: The Provocation of Mutism in the Cinema of Michael Haneke” (2013) and a forthcoming book on sound in the films of Quentin Tarantino.
- Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, School of Social Work, an expert on public art, social memory, and mass violence in Columbia, author of Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin, Columbia(2010).
- Ayu Ratih, PhD candidate, Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program, an expert on Indonesian history, especially the violence of 1965-66 as experienced by the victims, co-editor of a book of Indonesian-language oral history essays The Year that Never Ended(2004), and research director of the Indonesian Institute of Social History, Jakarta.
This event is being sponsored by the UBC History Department. It is being co-sponsored by UBC’s Department of Theatre and Film and the Centre for Southeast Asian Research.
Contact: Stefana Fratila, stefana.fratila@gmail.com, John Roosa,jroosa@mail.ubc.ca