Quotes from Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from.

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.

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

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

I have a British and an American passport.

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

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

In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell.

There are committed Indonesian filmmakers who are committed supporters of 'The Act Of Killing.'

I think we are fascinated and scared by evil at the same time. I think it's important not to suppress our fascination but to walk into it with open eyes.

I think that indignation is pleasurable, and it's pleasurable because it's self-righteous.

I wanted to resist in 'The Look of Silence' making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.

I had been working with a community of survivors who had lost their relatives and were too scared to talk about it.

You see, 'The Look of Silence' is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It's normally never done because it is too dangerous.

My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see 'Silkwood,' which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant.

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.

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

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 think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.

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.

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.

You cry the first tear because something is genuinely, singularly upsetting. And you cry the second tear because everybody is crying that first tear with you, and you know that.

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.