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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

Shadow

Think

Legal

" 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 have a British and an American passport. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

Work

Admirer

" 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. "

" I'm against escapist entertainment. "

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

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "