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 OppenheimerPerformance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?
Joshua OppenheimerI really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable.
Joshua OppenheimerThe killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country.
Joshua OppenheimerI 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.
Joshua Oppenheimer