Oscar Nominee Joshua Oppenheimer Talks Politics, ‘The End’ at Göteborg

U.S. filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, now based in Denmark, worries his “home country is perhaps becoming a dictatorship.”  

“It remains to be seen. The question we all face, each and every one of us, is this: ‘Is it too late for us?’ I encourage you to look up and see that above you, there’s still a sky,” he said at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival on Sunday. 

“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.  

“Through that sentimental gesture of placing that emoji, we abdicate our responsibility to do anything further. We escape from the horror of what we’ve just witnessed and place ourselves in a bunker. Do we still have time to do that?”  

Oppenheimer, behind Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” directed starry musical “The End” featuring Tilda Swinton – who produced alongside Oppenheimer and Signe Byrge Sørensen – George MacKay, Moses Ingram and Michael Shannon. 

Initially, he was supposed to make another doc about wealthy people “exploiting a country that was terrified of them.”  

“People who could literally get away with murder as they were building their business empires. 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. It turned out to be underground, much like the bunker in ‘The End,’” he…