Documentarian explores nature and purpose of non-fiction film

The master class by Academy Award-nominated documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer on the final day of Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event offered insights into documentary filmmaking and an examination of the nature of testimony in his films.The session opened with Oppenheimer discussing his decision to become a documentary filmmaker, which came to him in a moment of clarity on a glacier in northern Pakistan. After spending six months in India working on a project in Kolkata where street theatre was being used as a political organising tool, Oppenheimer was trekking in northern Pakistan and had an epiphany while reflecting on the intense emotional experience: “Maybe in that moment, I reckoned that if I became a non-fiction filmmaker I would be able to reflect on these experiences, excavate them and work with them.” Describing the impact of his mentor, Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan Makavejev, Oppenheimer said: “He combined documentary and narrative to great effect and I was always fascinated by this intersection between non-fiction and fiction.”Renowned for his two Academy Award-nominated documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which explore the brutal legacy of the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 through a series of interviews with members of the paramilitary organisation Pemuda Pancasila, Oppenheimer discussed how he was first drawn to Indonesia to conduct a filmmaking workshop with members of the plantation union. This led to a 13-year journey and two documentaries, which he described as “an examination of the abyss that lies between ourselves, and the stories we tell about ourselves.”The exposé of the regime depicted in his films is notable for the surreal way in which the perpetrators describe and re-enact their actions during the killings - something that Oppenheimer discussed as integral to understanding “how they wanted to portray the events, and how they wanted their own society and the world to perceive these events.”“I never once asked a perpetrator to act anything out, it came from them. They would immediately start boasting about what they had done, they would invite me to the places and launch into these spontaneous shows of how they killed, performing their impunity every time they boasted.”In discussing the scenes, Oppenheimer articulated how the melodrama serves as a form of moral blindness and how in documentary filmmaking dramatisation can trivialise horror: “The melodrama is a form of escapism that takes us away from the singular horror of the situation. It is the same with sentimentality – which is something we often introduce unwittingly in our films. It is always escapist.”He also discussed his 2016 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, The Look of Silence, a companion piece to The Act of Killing, which follows an optician named Adi as he confronts the men responsible for the genocide that killed his older brother. While testing their eyesight, he asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. Oppenheimer discussed the device of the eye test as a mechanism to create intimacy between Adi and the interview subjects and how it then evolved into a broader metaphor for the film, referring to the moral blindness of the perpetrators and their distorted vision of the events of the past.