The first narrative feature by Joshua Oppenheimer, one of the leading documentary filmmakers of our time, is a post-apocalyptic musical set in a lavish underground bunker built inside a former salt mine. For the past 25 years – since Earth became uninhabitable due to ecological collapse – Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), and their Son (George MacKay), who has never seen the outside world, have lived there in isolation. Bound by daily rituals, they’ve managed to preserve a sense of normality – until the unexpected arrival of a stranger, the Girl (Moses Ingram), shatters their carefully maintained routine. As tensions rise, their seemingly idyllic life begins to unravel.
In his narrative debut, Oppenheimer radically reimagines the musical genre to confront a burning ethical dilemma: can guilt be so overwhelming that it renders redemption impossible – trapping us, as a species, in the sins of our past? During his research, he visited real-life bunkers of the ultra-wealthy doomsday preppers, techno-feudalists, and apocalyptic theologians, who view the end of the world not as fiction but as fact. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor aptly summarize in their Guardian essay The Rise of End Times Fascism, this grotesque, supremacist survivalism has become the reigning ideology of many global elites. The forces we’re up against have long accepted the mass death of human and nonhuman life. What we’re witnessing is a kind of celebratory fatalism, a final refuge for those who would rather revel in destruction than imagine a world without their dominance. It is our task to build a movement strong enough to stop them.
Awards and Festivals:
Toronto International Film Festival (2024) – World Premiere; San Sebastián International Film Festival (2024); Chicago International Film Festival (2024)
Joshua Oppenheimer was born in Texas in 1974. For over a decade, he worked closely with paramilitary groups, death squads, and their victims, exploring the relationship between political violence and its public image. He studied at Harvard and Central St Martins in London. One of today’s most influential documentary filmmakers, Oppenheimer gained international acclaim with The Act of Killing (2012) – one of the most awarded documentaries of the last decade – and The Look of Silence (2014), which won five prizes at the 71st Venice Film Festival. Both were Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary. His films lead us into the heart of darkness, confronting audiences with the normalization of trauma and violence – from the Indonesian genocide (the focus of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence) to the end of the world, the central concern of his latest work, The End. In 2015, the Subversive Festival awarded him the Wild Dreamer Prize for lifetime achievement, during which he gave a masterclass titled Documentarians Among Mass Murderers, co-organized with the NGO Restart.
