I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the rea….

In Indonesian, the word isn't translating as "gangster." It's "preman", which comes from the Dutch "préman", which of course the thing that's "freema….

I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifi….

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger reenactments with a whole army of parami….

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?.

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social a….

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations ….

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions..

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because….

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good gu….

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country..

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the ….

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe ….

I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker..

I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable..

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renai….

People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came….

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like..

Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having..

I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You can make a journalistic repo….

I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do ….