Born in 1974 in the United States, Director Joshua Oppenheimer is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is a partner at the production company Final Cut for Real. He has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. He was educated at Harvard and Central Saint Martins, and The Act of Killing is his debut feature-length film. His earlier works include The Globalization Tapes (2003, co-directed with Christine Cynn), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998) and These Places We've Learned to Call Home (1996). He is artistic director of the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film, University of Westminster.