ABSTRACT
Joshua Oppenheimer (b. 1974) is the director of several award-winning documentary films and Reader in Documentary Film and Artistic Director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster. From 2007 to 2011, he was senior researcher on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)’s Genocide and Genre project. For over a decade, he has worked with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. We sat down with him to talk about his Oscar-nominated film, The Act of Killing (2012), in which former Indonesian death-squad leaders reenact their real-life mass killings in their favorite cinematic genres, including film noir, westerns and musicals.
