Tag - joshua-oppenheimer

 
 

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER

Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 23, 2015
Top 10 films of 2015: Like finding a needle in a haystack
Finding alternatives in 2015 to big-budget blockbusters and beard-stroking festival films wasn't easyIt has been a lean year. All too often, it felt like you had seen the movies of 2015 before — each new release seemed to be the shadow of a shadow of an original idea. You could see it popcorn flicks such as "Fifty Shades of Gray" or "Ant-Man" as well as Oscar-bait biopics such as "The Imitation Game" and "The Theory of Everything," never mind glacial "slow cinema" such as "Winter Sleep." Cinema is not dead, but it has lost its mojo, split between the extremes of gazillion-dollar superhero fireball porn or beard-stroking festival films while ceding the cultural middle-ground to television and online video.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 1, 2015
Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer gazes long into the abysses of Asia
In a world bent on looking only at the future, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer weaves his documentaries from memories and lives that are long gone. He astonished the film world in 2012 with his Oscar-nominated documentary "The Act of Killing," whose central character, Anwar Congo, was a death-squad leader during Indonesia's communist purge of 1965-66. At Oppenheimer's request, Congo reenacted the process of arrest, torture and mass murder of his many victims. Friends from his former paramilitary unit followed suit, and Oppenheimer gave them the option of further reenacting their executions in whatever cinematic styles they desired — he shows them producing an ostentatious musical and a classic Hollywood-style noir film. The resulting footage was more grotesque, absurd and explosively violent than anything a fictional movie could have conjured.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 10, 2014
Flamboyant descent into the heart of darkness
He's been on the road promoting his film for about a year now, but that doesn't mean Joshua Oppenheimer is any less passionate about his Oscar-nominated documentary, "The Act of Killing." Ask the Texas-born, Denmark-residing director a question about his work and it may be a good 10 minutes before he comes up for air.

Longform

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