Joshua Oppenheimer sets images of life in a retirement community in Arizona (as seen through television commercials) to a talk radio interview with a female convict extolling the benefits of her time on Sherriff Joe Arpaio's chain gang. It is two different kinds of sale jobs working at cross-purposes. Oppenheimer takes the luster off the idealistic advertising images through video distortion and electronic interference and cuts-up both the video and audio tracks until the weird poetry of the chain gang prisoner's lessons in life and death gives the commercial presentation a creepy disconnection from any kind of living ideal. It follows A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARADISE AS TOLD BY THE COCKROACHES and MARKET UPDATE as another sharp jab at consumerism as an illusory promise.

Joshua Oppenheimer reimagines a sixty-second stock market update as maniacal monologue by a mumbling madman giving a bizarre play-by-play of floor traders and urban pedestrians as the trading day comes to an end. Created while in the midst of production on the feature-length GLOBALIZATION TAPES, this brief film is Oppenheimer's most concentrated piece of socio-political commentary: a quick, colorful political cartoon of capitalism plucked out-of-context and set to a soundtrack that is both comic and somewhat sinister. The upbeat musical accompaniment only enhances the empty celebration of meaningless activity.

For eighty cents an hour, prisoners in a New Mexico prison answer telephones for the state tourism hotline. Co-directed by Christine Cynn.

A group of flower arrangers practice their art in this second silent early short from Joshua Oppenheimer.

A kaleidoscopic history of the American heartland, nuclear weapons and the Native American genocide.

After the sudden arrival of a stranger threatens the family’s luxurious compound deep underground, Son begins to question their seemingly perfect existence.

The Globalization Tapes is a film made by workers for workers. The story isn’t told by experts, but by union members from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Their experience is complemented by workers from both Colombia and Holland. The film powerfully documents their exploration of history, globalization, and how unions around the world can support each other and struggle together.
Using their own forbidden history as a case study, the Indonesian filmmakers trace the development of contemporary globalization from its roots in colonialism to the present. Through chilling first-hand accounts, The Globalization Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy”, and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The film explains how these institutions shape and enforcing the corporate world order.
A collaboration between the Independent Plantation Workers’ Union of Sumatra (Indonesia), the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers (IUF) and Vision Machine Film Project.

An optician grapples with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, during which his older brother was exterminated.

Filmmakers expose the horrifying mass executions of accused communists in Indonesia and those who are celebrated in their country for perpetrating the crime.