An organisation that celebrates nonfiction filmmaking, Cinema Eye with their annual list highlights the subjects at the heart of some of the year's best films, recognising the collaborative spirit of documentary filmmaking. On this year's 15-person list are the protagonists from three Danish-produced films: Adi Rukun of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence, Yula of Hanna Polak's 2014 IDFA winner Something Better to Come, and Paul Mangwana of Camilla Nielsson's Democrats.
Cinema Eye produces the annual Cinema Eye Honors show in January in New York. Since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, The Look of Silence has amassed countless awards and nominations from around the globe. Earlier in November, the film received a European Film Award nomination, with the winners being announced on 12 December in Berlin.
The Look of Silence
Through Joshua Oppenheimer's footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.
