A sculpture entitled The Scream was unveiled in Amsterdam Sunday as a tribute to filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was killed by a religious extremist three years ago.

Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen and other politicians joined van Gogh's friends and family at the afternoon ceremony in Oosterpark, close to the street where the filmmaker was killed in November 2004.

Friends and fans of Theo van Gogh attend the unveiling of a sculpture in memory of the slain film maker in Amsterdam. The Scream is meant to portray freedom of expression and how the filmmaker's voice was silenced.
(Peter Dejong/Associated Press)

While his work was controversial, van Gogh was an artist who had a clear message about freedom of speech, Cohen said at the ceremony.

Created by Jeroen Henneman, the stainless steel sculpture depicts a face with its mouth closed morphing into one that is screaming. It is meant to portray freedom of expression and how the filmmaker's voice was silenced.

Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan citizen, ambushed van Gogh on an Amsterdam street and then shot, stabbed and slit his throat. Bouyeri then thrust a manifesto into the filmmaker's chest on the point of his knife.

Bouyeri was sentenced to life in prison for killing van Gogh, whose great-grandfather was the brother of the famed Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh.

The filmmaker had criticized radical Islam in newspaper columns and films such as Submission, which he co-wrote with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who calles herself an "ex-Muslim." For a period after van Gogh's death, Ali went into hiding.

At the time of his death, van Gogh had been in talks to adapt a Dutch film trilogy into English-language films. His U.S. and Dutch partners have continued the project and Steve Buscemi recently premiered Interview — the first of the series — at several film festivals around the world.