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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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