Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country.

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renaissance where military dictatorship took over.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions.

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations because I could document what happened that way.

I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

A podium is something you walk up to, you say what you want to say and when you're finished, you leave.

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?

I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable.

Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

In Indonesian, the word isn't translating as "gangster." It's "preman", which comes from the Dutch "préman", which of course the thing that's "freeman" in English.

Films can't change the society they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.

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

All we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards.

In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.