78 Quotes by Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.

Films can't change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.

I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.

Military rule in Indonesia formally ended in 1998, but the army remains above the law.

At our production company, the trademark dish - and this sounds particularly revolting - is curried pickled herring.

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.

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.