Film Screening: Robert Lemelson

Ethel LeFrak Holocaust Education Conference 2009 (Updates and Links)

Filmmaker Robert Lemelson is a psychological anthropologist with the Semel Institute for Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who has conducted research in Indonesian since 1993.

Told in the context of one of the largest unknown mass-killings of the 20th century—the murders of an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Indonesians in 1965 when General Suharto’s New Order regime began a bloody purge of suspected “communists” throughout the country—the film focuses on how children deal with severe trauma caused by the death, imprisonment and disappearance of close family members.

Through the compelling testimonies of four individuals and their families, all of whom have broken their silence publically for the first time, each person provides an intimate and frightening look at what it was like to experience and survive Suharto’s mass-killings. Lemelson told The Jakarta Post (August 8, 2009), “An event of such magnitude, where all historians agree hundreds of thousands or even a million of people were killed, needs to be understood, debated, explored, narrated and memorialized.”

He will screen his documentary film “40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy” on Monday, October 26, beginning at 7:00 p.m. in Cecilian Hall. Afterward, he will join a distinguished panel in discussing the film.

Panel members include Carol Rittner, R.S.M., and the Dr. Marsha R. Grossman Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. James G. Paharik, associate professor of sociology and advisor for Seton Hill University’s Genocide and Holocaust Studies Program, will moderate the discussion.

Links:

• 40 Years of Silence (Homepage)
• Film "40 Years of Silence" (Facebook Network)