And the end of the world caught them dancing. AND Joshua Oppenheimer (Austin, Texas, 1974) Filmed them in ‘The End’, their new film, a post -political musical starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon y George MacKay. The film collects a particular family in a … Luxury bunker two decades after the end of the world to which the arrival of an unknown, played by Moses Ingram, causes them another cataclysm, only that this is emotional and inside the bunker.
After passing through the San Sebastián Festival‘The End’ this Friday comes to Spanish cinemas. Oppenheimer, director of the acclaimed ‘The Act of Killing‘, releases a reflection on what human being means. And look for the answer through music. “The fact that it is a musical is what makes this film about how we tell ourselves stories to cover the world of ourselves,” the director told ABC. For Oppenheimer, songs are not ornaments: they are revelations. «’The End’ is about the human ability to lie and the terrible consequences of that. How we invent excuses to relieve our regrets and how later we manage to believe those excuses ».
Because in ‘The End’, in reality, the end of the world did not surprise the protagonist family dancing; They were surprised in the middle of a great fiction. “The songs are the truth that the characters cannot say out loud,” adds the filmmaker, for whom the film is still a political metaphor of our day. “We now live with three urgent problems,” says the director: the climatic – “we headed to mass extinction” -; The oligarchy – “Our democratic voice has been reduced” – and xenophobia – “the lie that we can save our families without the human family is a metaphor of the xenophobia epidemic that is destroying Europe and that it is a cancer in the United States” -.
Oppenheimer wraps the seriousness of the message of ‘The End’ in an environment that disarms. “Global problems are miniaturized to the size of a family, and the psychological problems of families expand to be global,” says a man who chews each phrase so that the message is not lost, something he also does on the screen in that family bunker full of secrets and betrayals. “It could be your family, I don’t know, but surely it could be mine.”
Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon y George MacKay
He grew up, he confesses, in a home where “everyone was afraid to be honest.” That vulnerability moves to ‘The End‘: «The cinema has the unique power of empathy. I want people to look in these extreme situations and know each other more deeply ».
The director, whose career took off with ‘The Act of Killing’ – Nominated for the Oscar and an earthquake in his premiere year, with a squad of Indonesian murderers telling how they killed the political rivals after the coup d’etat of 1965 – he sees in ‘The End’ a continuation of his obsession with impunity and memory. “The film is absolutely about impunity,” he emphasizes. Here, unlike the documentary, where he lived with real murderers, he created a world from scratch. “It is not an easy movie, but art must bother,” he defends. “If you can’t look at your most urgent truths, you can’t change.” And it finishes: «We live at a time where sincerity is confused with naivety and Cinism is used as a mask to camouflage despair».
Despite his gloomy tone, Oppenheimer is optimistic. “I could not do this job if it wasn’t,” he says. “It is a story to warn us, but also an invitation to empathy and forgiveness.” Because the alternative, he regrets, is to walk “directly to the abyss.”
