I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking.

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.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

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

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

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

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.