These Places We've Learned to Call Home

"These Places We've Learned to Call Home" is an experimental documentary that strings together video fragments and staged performances to probe militias, religious fundamentalisms, and the myth of the American West. Directors Joshua Oppenheimer and Jacob Silber weave voices, images, and scenes that blur the line between documentary observation and performative theatre. Instead of a single narrative, the film invites viewers to see how memory and ideology take shape in everyday moments, from rural backgrounds to improvised rituals. Its cadence shifts between essayistic reflection and charged tableaux, leaving room for interpretation rather than pat conclusions. The result feels like a meditation on belief, place, and who owns land in a country haunted by its myths and contradictions, and invites ongoing discussion.

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Jacob Silber, this 1996 experimental documentary appears to be an original concept rather than an adaptation, blending video art with performative sequences to examine ideology and landscape. It derives from experiments in image and ritual.

Box office: Not publicly reported; as an experimental piece from a relatively obscure collaboration, it appears to have had limited distribution and no widely documented commercial gross. If any, profits would be negligible.

Its use of near silence, abrupt cuts, and stark landscapes has influenced a handful of artists experimenting at the edge of documentary form.

Reception & Themes: Critics have divided opinions on its abstract approach but generally acknowledge its provocative critique of power and belief. Major themes include memory, landscape as politics, and the tension between performance and reality within American myth making.