An old man, almost mute, his memory gone, and so too his son in a terrifying history: the senile man in Joshua Oppenheimer's film, The Look of Silence.

In Oppenheimer's film, which sets out to show the cruelty in Indonesia in the mid 1960s, this semi-paralyzed figure seems like an allegory of the horror and silence of the past.

I watched The Look of Silence at a cinema in Glasgow, Scotland, three weeks ago. The majority of the audience was not famili