By Vanessa Zimmer

When Jonathan Oppenheim died in July 2020, Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson could not suppress her sadness and admiration for the longtime advisor and mentor at the Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab.

“He was an artist, a philosopher, a meaning-maker and an implacable champion of documentary as an art form,” she wrote. “He was unlike anyone I had ever met and he transformed the way I think about nonfiction film.”

The man’s absolute passion was documentary film. A documentary wasn’t just a vehicle for information; it was much higher than that. Oppenheim considered it “the most important and evolved face of modern human expression,” said longtime filmmaker Joe Bini, editor of such documentaries as The Tillman Story and Grizzly Man.

“He devoted his creative life to it, and he held it to the highest, most uncompromising artistic standards possible,” Bini added in Jackson’s memorial piece. “Jonathan deeply understood drama, emotion, and imagery, and had profound character insight. He shared these gifts, humbly, to anyone who would listen, and he brought them, triumphantly, to every film he was ever involved with.”

Several of those who knew Oppenheim paid tribute not just to his intuitive and practiced knowledge of editing, but to his thoughtful nature. Said award-winning documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, also in Jackson’s article: “I have never heard another person speak like Jonathan did. He searched for words in the middle of his sentences, lifting his head up toward the sky, leaving long gaps of silence open between the words until he found the word that was revelatory in its meaning. I likened him to a goldfish reaching up to the surface for each bubble of air.”