Lav Diaz

“You look at the industry; they’re distorting everything, its very escapist. It’s all about vanity, about making money, about seeking fame and fortune.”

Kidlat Tahimik

Mario O'Hara

Ritwik Ghatak

“Why films? Because I am totally crazy. I can’t live without making films. I look at the struggle and misery of contemporary life. And try to say something to the best of my ability.”

Arthur Lipsett

“If I could say it in words I wouldn’t be making films.”

Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?”

Nagisa Ôshima

“My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Glauber Rocha

“Cinema Novo stood with the Brazilian utopia. If it is ugly, irregular, dirty, confusing and chaotic, it is also beautiful, disharmonic, luminous and revolutionary.”

Andrzej Żuławski

“To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”

Joris Ivens

Shyam Benegal

“I don’t know why our industry and media gives so much importance to the Oscars. You see it’s very important for Hollywood and foreign films because once one of their films receives an Oscar it goes on to become a big commercial success. Our films won’t get that sort of benefit.”

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Liu Chia-Liang

“To me, an action movie must have funny parts. Until then, kung fu movies always ended with a killing, a big slaughter. I said that I won’t do that. In my opinion, it is not necessary to destroy the villain to make the audience happy. A dyed-in-the-wool scoundrel who repented and found the righteous way could be just as good.”

Derek Jarman

“I wouldn’t wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien

“The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

Bill Douglas

“I was always somewhat obsessed with my past.”