The International Documentary Association (IDA) has named ‘The Look of Silence’ by American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer as the best documentary of 2015.

The film received the prize for best feature at the 31st annual IDA Documentary Awards ceremony held in Los Angeles, US.

‘The Look of Silence’ is a companion piece to Oppenheimer’s 2012 ‘Act of Killing’ and has also been nominated for the 2015 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

Oppenheimer’s ‘Look of Silence’ focuses on the anti-communist purge in Indonesia during the 1960s. The film portrays the violent killings that took place in the country following a military coup in 1965.

The 2014 production has won numerous international awards, including the Peace Film Prize of the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival and the 2015 Golden Frog Award of the Camerimage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography in Poland. 

Born in 1974, Joshua Oppenheimer is an American film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has made 13 different films so far and received the MacArthur Genius Award in 2014.

This year’s IDA award for the best short went to ‘Last Day of Freedom’ by Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman.

Matthew Heineman was granted the event’s Courage Under Fire Award for his depiction of Mexican drug war in ‘Cartel Land.’