Joshua Oppenheimer

It's basically it's a documentary.

This filmmaker, Oppenheimer his name is, he goes out to the country and he talks to people that were part of the purge from the sort of bad guy side if you like, they killed all these people.

And he talks about how they killed them and the torture techniques, and he gets them to put on a play recreating the purge.

Mm.

radicalized.

So, my dear Johnny, what do you know about Indonesia? What do you know about, let's say, a book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins or a movie called The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer?

I've seen The Act of Killing, and I really...

It's hard to say I love that movie, but I did enjoy...

In doing so, they have programmed a lot of duds, but I keep seeing them in hopes that eventually I'll find one that actually has a reason to be a musical.

If you scroll back in the feed, you can find my episode on Joshua Oppenheimer's End of the World musical, The End, at TIFF back in 2024, which was pretty much a misfire.

But across pretty much all the musicals TIFF has programmed, aside from, although also kind of even including the jukebox musicals, you can take it as pretty much a given that if it's an original musical, the music will be pretty forgettable and not exactly full of tunes you can hum.

That is certainly true of Stuffed, but deciding whether or not the music is very good is kind of an unhelpful metric for it because unlike most of the TIFF musicals I've seen in recent years, Stuffed is actually really thoughtful about how it uses the musical form.

Yeah.

Well, there's there's Joshua Oppenheimer's The End.

Yes, exactly.

It's

I'm hoping that ultimately what I'm trying to do is not anything new.

It's really taking what used to be maybe a form of documentary filmmaking, how Robert Flaherty would make films or Joshua Oppenheimer or filmmakers like Robert Greene or the Ross brothers.

And for me, one of the biggest forms of inspiration, Abbas Kiarostami, who made his film Close-Up.

All these filmmakers are using narrative tools to make and represent reality in really ecstatic ways.

Well, for my number four, I'll start by saying the Oscars, as we often bemoan, don't usually get it right, somewhat notoriously when it comes to Best Documentary Feature, but in 2016, they did.

This film won the Best Documentary Oscar, beat out, among other films, Joshua Oppenheimer's very good The Look of Silence, and another very good music documentary, Liz Garbus' What Happened, Miss Simone? Definitely recommend that if you haven't seen it.

But this film is Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia, who came onto my radar in 2010 when he made Senna, which was one of my top 10 films of that year.

Another documentary about a legendary artist, you could say, who died tragically, died too young, Formula One driver Ayrton Senna.