Joshua Oppenheimer(II)

His paternal grandfather came from Frankfurt, Germany and his grandmother from Berlin. His grandfather had left Germany before Hitler came to power and was studying in the US. He returned there and was able to rescue some family members, but most of the Oppenheimers were wiped out in the Holocaust.

[on O Ato de Matar (2012)] I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable. And the question is: Why are they doing this? For whom are they doing this? What does it mean to them? How do they want to be seen? How do they see themselves? And this method was a way of answering those questions...I think it almost stops being a documentary altogether. It becomes a kind of hallucinatory aria, a kind of fever dream...[that] transcends documentary.