Lance Oppenheim AB '19 is a filmmaker from South Florida. His work blends nonfiction storytelling with heightened, cinematic formalism and flourishes of the surreal. His first feature, Some Kind of Heaven, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released by Magnolia Pictures in 2021. In 2024, he premiered FX/Hulu's Spermworld, his second feature film, and HBO & Elara Pictures' Ren Faire, his first television series, to critical acclaim. Alongside his producing partner, Melissa Oppenheim Lano, Lance is producing a documentary feature about the annual python hunt in Florida with Artists Equity and director Xander Robin. He is in post production on his next film with A24. Oppenheim is a former Sundance Ignite Fellow, and was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” in 2023.

Lance Oppenheim (AB ‘19) credits his success as a filmmaker to being bad at sports as a kid. Well, not really— but that is exactly what started him on the path to becoming the successful filmmaker, director, and producer that he is today.

“I knew an athletic life was never the one for me,” Lance laughs, “And my dad is a lawyer, but he had taken a...film criticism class in college. And my mom, who also is a lawyer, was obsessed with THE TWILIGHT ZONE, and so at a really early age I was exposed to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and my mom showed me all of THE TWILIGHT ZONE episodes.” Rather than running around the soccer field or swinging a baseball bat, young Lance was receiving a varied and thorough film education from his parents. The narrative works he saw onscreen were captivating. 

“Seeing how people could basically immerse you in a world and [make] you forget everything you know about yourself—that was the thing that was always interesting to me.” Lance recalls. Growing up in Florida, movie making wasn’t a very common career. Still, Lance found his way to documentary film; in fact, it was the media path of least resistance. “I knew that to make a narrative film you needed an actor, a crew, to help,” Lance shrugs. “And with documentaries, all you really needed was a compelling story or a character.” 

While in high school, Lance sourced his stories from somewhere full of all kinds of interesting characters: the Sun Sentinel, his local newspaper. “I would reach out to the people in the articles, and then start to essentially make a film and try and combine the same feelings I had when I was watching all of my favorite movies growing up,” Lance explains. He sought to imbue his work with a sense of subjectivity, not just to be an observer, but to “really immerse an audience into the headspace of somebody… and find ways to just get all the narrative tools and narrative techniques that you'd find in a fiction film and try and bridge them over to a documentary.” And that continues to be Lance’s approach to documentary filmmaking, having now released several works that garnered critical acclaim including SOME KIND OF HEAVEN, SPERMWORLD, and, most recently, REN FAIRE. 

As evident throughout his body of work, there is a particular through line in each piece that Lance searches for as he approaches potential new subjects. “I'm interested in these kinds of American fantasy lands,” Lance asserts. “Places where people try to use their resources to just enact a fantasy of some sorts. And inevitably I'm also interested in dreams. Where do dreams end? Where do they die? What happens if the fantasy that you thought you wanted ends up entombing you and suffocating you? … There's also this dimension of just people looking for meaning and purpose and feeling adrift, like they're on the margins of a life that maybe everyone else is living.” He adds, “Those are sort of the things that I'm always looking for.”

Once his documentary’s subject is solidified, the first question Lance will ask himself to start the process is how to visually represent the inner lives of that subject, those people, that the story belongs to. “What do they see themselves to be? What kind of stories do they think they're leading?” Lance expands, “I want to use everything in my cinematic toolkit to reflect that.”

But again, Lance always ensures that the people involved in his documentaries are part of the filmmaking process, not just people being filmed. He affirms, “It’s a question of how willing they are to be a part of an artistic experience…I promise the people that are involved in it that it's going to be fairly invasive. But it's going to be collaborative. And at the end of the day they will hopefully feel seen.” 

This approach helped Lance greatly in creating his most recent work, REN FAIRE, now available to stream on HBO Max. “With REN FAIRE, I would show everyone little clips here and there, how they’re being represented in the film,” Lance explains. “And it was sort of this universe of constant stress and pain… so it felt that this project probably had the most sort of investigative journalistic components...out of any of the projects I've worked on so far, just because of needing to know exactly what was going on with three or four people at any given moment. If there was some sort of chess move being made by one person, I knew that I'd have to be with another person to capture their emotions.”

And people certainly grow self-conscious about expressing these emotions in front of a whole camera crew. “I want to capture what's truthful to them,” Lance says. “I never want to make something up that just feels narratively convenient. It has to be emotionally real to them. And there is this other sort of very complicated, strange version of truth and pain in their performances, especially when you're watching something happen that's really painful for any of the people that are part of it… But then by acknowledging it, there's a way to break through it and capture a new kind of reality.”

This guiding principle of collaboration, honesty, and, in a larger sense, ethical filmmaking, came to Lance by way of Harvard film professor Robb Moss, who recommended Lance read the book THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm while he was in school. Malcolm’s book discusses the inherent question of whether there is an ethical way to make documentary, or any form of nonfiction storytelling, that isn’t manipulative and extractive, and, ultimately, unethical. Lance cites this as a book he thinks about all the time as he’s working. 

“This is ultimately a very cynical outlook on the whole profession of nonfiction storytelling,” he notes. “But thinking about ways in which you could heed the lessons that Janet Malcolm was saying… How do I do so in a way that feels equitable to the people in the films, not just something that looks artistically pretty… How do I sort of merge the two things? … So that when [the film] is done finally the people in it can stand by it and feel as proud of it as the filmmakers felt.”

Lance continues, “Always remind yourself that these are real people and real people's lives, and you have a responsibility to them if they trust you with telling their story, if they trust you with being vulnerable on camera. You have to be good to them. And if you're not in love with someone that you're making a film about, then it's probably not worth your time… If the people in the film don't like it, then what's the purpose?”

Lance’s work strives to answer the questions he poses to himself as he creates them: “How do I find the things that I personally find relatable in each of these people's stories? How do I put that on screens so that when someone watches it they can connect with something that's profoundly human?” Because at the end of the day, the one commonality across humanity is that we’re all just looking to feel seen. 

This profile was written by Laura Frustaci.