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All Quotes by author - Joshua Oppenheimer
" At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories. "
Trying
Cinema
Fantasy
" Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt. "
Denial
Feeling
Guilt
" For me, I'm a filmmaker because, above all, I'm an explorer. It's my way of exploring and investigating the problems, the questions, and the mysteries about what it means to be human that vex me most, that keep me up at night, and that, when I finally fall asleep, insinuate themselves into my dreams. "
Dreams
Way
Me
" From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it. "
Then
Shooting
Editing
" I didn't really get any rigorous background in film history. "
Really
History
Get
" I don't think there's a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I'm not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess. "
Think
Perfect
Life
" I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship. "
Community
Dictatorship
Help
" If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful. "
Why
You
Things
" If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy's day and all the classmates' and teachers' day is you being there filming, not the school. "
Classmates
You
Teachers
" I have a British and an American passport. "
British
American
Passport
" I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.' "
Hearing
Holocaust
Pan
" I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general. "
Work
Admirer
Like
" I'm against escapist entertainment. "
Entertainment
Escapist
Against
" Indonesia can hold regular elections, but if the laws do not apply to the most powerful elements in society, then there is no rule of law and no genuine democracy. The country will never become a true democracy until it takes serious steps to end impunity. "
Society
Law
Democracy
" In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present. "
Camera
Window
Reality
" I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life. "
Life
Way
Imagination
" I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that. "
Cinema
Reality
Think
" I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity. "
Shadow
Think
Legal
" I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people. "
Evil
Looking
Pure
" Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll. "
Small
Experience
Society
" No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there. "
Presence
Camera
How
" Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves. "
You
Matter
People
" 'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council. "
Look
Human Rights
Government
" Waking from any fever dream, one retains, above all, impressions seared into memory. "
Memory
Fever
Above
" What I've always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is. "
Strange
Look
Mysterious
" Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity. "
Difficult
Working
Process
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