Joshua Oppenheimer is one of the world's most renowned documentary filmmakers. His multi award-winning films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) have challenged and redefined perceptions about the very nature of documentary cinema.
Second Run are delighted to present, for the first time ever on home video, the complete cycle of Joshua Oppenheimer's early works. These films do not simply record or document facts; they are playful, artistic, and philosophical. Often confrontational, and frequently disquieting, they reveal how Oppenheimer's instinct for social justice has developed into a fully-fledged art form.
A compelling body of work, this DVD contains 12 films:
• Light Test (1995)
• Camera Test (1995)
• Hugh (1996)
• The Challenge of Manufacturing (1996)
• These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home (1996)
• The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1997)
• Land of Enchantment (2000)
• The Globalisation Tapes (2002)
• Market Update (2002)
• A Brief History of Paradise as Told by the Cockroaches (2002)
• Muzak: A Tool of Management (2002)
• Postcard from Sun City, Arizona (2003)
Second Run present Joshua Oppenheimer's early works from brand new re-mastered transfers of the films, supervised and approved by the director - plus a newly filmed, exclusive interview with director Joshua Oppenheimer.
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• Presented from brand new re-mastered transfers of the films, supervised and approved by the director.
• Exclusive, new filmed interview with director Joshua Oppenheimer.
• 24-page booklet featuring an expansive new essay by film writer, curator and producer Gareth Evans.
• Released for the first time anywhere on home video.
These Places We've Learned to Call Home (1996)
1997 San Francisco Int’l Film Festival/ Winner: Gold Spire
The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1997)
1998 Chicago International Film Festival
/ Winner: Gold Hugo
1998 Telluride Film Festival / Official Selection
1998 New England Film Festival / Winner: Best Experimental Film
"There's nothing out there, nothing, nothing in cinema that has this kind of depth... I walk away from [Joshua’s] films being illuminated and that's what you do not have in cinema nowadays... Real filmmaking, wonderful, incredible filmmaking that becomes indelible somehow in your memory and your whole existence" Werner Herzog
"Where journalistic immersion and philosophical brilliance meets humanism, there stands Joshua Oppenheimer with his camera" Sophie Monks Kaufman, Little White Lies
"Opens a genre of film as revelatory and intelligent dream, stimulant of social memory, and means for re-examining the relationship between fact and fiction, historical truth and social myth" Dušan Makavejev
"This vital new DVD release... this is a disquieting and essential set from Second Run... which help to complete the full, grotesque fresco of Oppenheimer's meteoric rise"
"For me documentary filmmaking is a way of making a life practice out of exploring the most painful, difficult, complicated mysteries that make us what we are and trying to then not tell you, report to you what happened during the exploration, but actually then translate that into an experience of mystery and truth - and therefore beauty - for everybody who sees the work" Joshua Oppenheimer
