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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

Trying

Cinema

Fantasy

" I'm against escapist entertainment. "

" I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people. "

" I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

Work

Admirer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

Dreams

Way

" No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.' "

" I have a British and an American passport. "

" 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. "

" From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it. "

" I didn't really get any rigorous background in film history. "

" Waking from any fever dream, one retains, above all, impressions seared into memory. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt. "

" 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. "