20+ Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes On Religion, Education And Intelligence

Joshua Oppenheimer is an American film director and producer. He is best known for his documentary films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which explore the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. His films have been praised for their unique approach to documentary filmmaking, often incorporating elements of fiction and reenactment. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Joshua Oppenheimer on religion, education, intelligence.

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

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. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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

I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifist, so I feel that no atrocity is ever justified. I've become more vigilant about evil. I think I recognize its seeds more quickly. I see its source. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing. — Joshua Oppenheimer

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger reenactments with a whole army of paramilitary people participating, I couldn't say my feelings openly in front of everybody, without it being dangerous for my crew. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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

I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do that. We want to be sucked into the events, suspend our disbelief and imagine that this is a fiction, but actually putting onscreen the gap between who the people are and who they want to be and therefore opening the question about why they want to be this person. — Joshua Oppenheimer

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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

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. — Joshua Oppenheimer

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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. — Joshua Oppenheimer

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. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Life Lessons by Joshua Oppenheimer

1. Joshua Oppenheimer's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of history and the power of storytelling to bring awareness to social issues.
2. He encourages viewers to think critically about the world around them and to challenge the status quo.
3. He also emphasizes the need for compassion and empathy in order to create meaningful change.