Yuriy Norshteyn

“Never allow oneself to remain the same – like a river, always renew yourself. I’m always wondering about the paths that would open animation to become a real dramatic art.”

Shûji Terayama

“Lying down in the attic, where angry waves sound very close, I make poetry my power.”

Chris Marker

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

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Victor Sjöström

“The thing that brought me into filmmaking was a youthful desire for adventure and a curiosity to try this new medium.”

Jean Epstein

“Is whether they get married in the end really all you want to know? Look, really, there is no film that ends badly, and the audience enters into happiness at the hour appointed on the program.”

Marcel L'Herbier

“There was one thing I detested more than anything, and that was money; first of all, because I was bankrupt; then, because I had been seeing so many examples all around me where money had played a fatal role.”

Germaine Dulac

Vittorio De Seta

Sarah Maldoror

“I play a cultural role as filmmaker. What interests me is to research films about African history, because our history has been written by others, not by us.”

Priit Pärn

Shirley Clarke

“I was embarrassed for years to let anyone know I had won an Academy Award for The Connection. That wasn’t really a prize I wanted to win. I was happy to say that The Connection got a prize at Cannes. I was happy to say that The Cool World was the first independent film to play in Venice.”

Souleymane Cissé

“Every nation has the right to be represented by the cinema.”

Sergei Parajanov

“I believe you have to be born a director. It’s like a child’s adventure: you take the initiative among other children and become a director, creating a mystery. You mould things into shape and create.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

František Vláčil

“I never worked as anyone's assistant director nor did I ever study at any film academy, thus the Army Film Division was my 'trade school'.”

José Val del Omar

“Life is only a slowed-down explosion, and I try to compress it to turn it into ecstasy: into eternal instant.”