Photo: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung / CC BY-SA 2.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Joshua Oppenheimer is a filmmaker I genuinely admire for his nerve. The Act of Killing in 2012 and The Look of Silence in 2014 are not easy watches, asking perpetrators of Indonesia's mass killings to reenact their own atrocities, and both earned Oscar nominations. A Texas-born, Harvard-educated Marshall Scholar and MacArthur Fellow now based in Copenhagen, he clearly chases the hardest moral questions. What I respect most is that he didn't repeat himself, branching into narrative with The End in 2024. To me he's a documentarian who treats cinema as a tool for confronting unspeakable history rather than just recording it.
Overview
Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer (born September 23, 1974) is an American and British film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He directed the Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), as well as his 2024 narrative debut, The End. Oppenheimer was a 1997 Marshall Scholar and a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Joshua Oppenheimer
- Name (Japanese)
- ジョシュア・オッペンハイマー
- Reading
- じょしゅあ・おっぺんはいまー
- Born
- September 23, 1974 (age 51)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Libra / Tiger
- Origin
- Texas, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- film director / film producer / executive producer / director
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Montgomery Blair High School
- University
- Harvard University
Awards & achievements
- Marshall Scholarship
- MacArthur Fellows Program
- 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Film director — see all → · Film producer — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.