Joshua Oppenheimer

“My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see 'Silkwood,' which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant.”

“I have a British and an American passport.”

“If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.”

“If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy's day and all the classmates' and teachers' day is you being there filming, not the school.”

“I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'”

“I'm against escapist entertainment.”

“I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction.”

“'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.”

“If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.”

“We all identify with the people we see, and in a good documentary, we are not just reading an account of the world, we're seeing and hearing our world.”

“Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from.”

“I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship.”

“From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it.”

“I wanted to resist in 'The Look of Silence' making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.”

“What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.”

“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.”

“In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell.”

“Cinema is, of course, the great storytelling medium of modernity.”

“I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.”

“No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there.”