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Oscar Nominee Joshua Oppenheimer Worries His ‘Home Country Is Becoming a Dictatorship’ But It’s Not ‘The End’ Just Yet: ‘Above You, There’s Still a Sky’
Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer talks politics, musical ‘The End’ at Göteborg.
“When we read about the genocide in Gaza – which horrifies me particularly because it’s committed in my name as a Jew – when we read about thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea every year, trying to escape conditions of misery that we knowingly impose on them so that our clothes, our electronics, our food and our energy remains cheap… We feel heartbroken for a second and then we look for suitably heartbroken emoji,” he noted. But I could not return safely to Indonesia after making ‘The Act of Killing.’ I began investigating oligarchs who had enriched themselves through violence elsewhere and I found a particular oil tycoon, I won’t say where, who invited me to see a home he was building. Making a musical turned it into a film about delusion, denial and that kind of false optimism.” Oppenheimer also opened up about his “really odd” background, from theoretical physics and cosmology studies – “I quickly realized I wasn’t going to find my answers there” – to working with sex workers in Calcutta’s red-light district on a street theater project.
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