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" I'm against escapist entertainment. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

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" 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

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

" '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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" I have a British and an American passport. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

" 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. "

Joshua Oppenheimer