British - Director | September 23, 1974 -
I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.
Joshua Oppenheimer
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I don't really want to leave anything in life behind. We have bad experiences, we have difficult experiences, but if you leave everything behind, you have no past.
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I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'
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I have a British and an American passport.
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I didn't really get any rigorous background in film history.
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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.
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'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.
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I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
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I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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