José Luis Guerín

“I don’t see cinema in terms of Spanish, French, European or American. I think we should see cinema as a separate continent; the only continent I understand is the continent of cinema.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Nathaniel Dorsky

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.”

Ernie Gehr

Nikos Nikolaidis

“A few days before we started shooting, some weird stangers appeared resembling Che Guevara’s cousins and told me 'Give us your script to read and we’ll let you know whether you should make this movie.' Of course, I gave it to them. Two days later they returned saying 'We like it, you can go ahead.' And I went ahead and shot it.”

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

“German intellectuals treat me as if I were the enemy. They do not want to hear about what I believe lies at the heart of German identity.”

Alexander Kluge

“We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.”

Jesse Richards

“I believe that the most effective way to really make subjective and authentic work involves an "addressing of the shadow" (as Billy Childish and Charles Thomson have described it). Now what does this mean exactly? It might mean that you are really obsessed with pubic hair, or maybe you are really embarrassed by a physical or mental disability that you try to hide, or like Billy Childish, you were abused as a child. These things, these "shadows" that we are hiding within ourselves, need to be brought forth into the light of day - in our films, in our work, in our poetry.”

Guy Debord

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”

Eugène Green

Lisandro Alonso

“If tomorrow I have to quit filmmaking, I will. I’m not going to sell my house for a project, that’s for sure. If I have to go back and work on my family’s farm, fine. I don’t have any problem with it. But I would cry a lot.”

Manoel de Oliveira

[Answering the questions: what keeps you going?] "There is no secret – it is work! It is doing something, it is a natural impulsion. My life is so complicated – I need space around me, I have so much going on and my house is small, and I need breathing space. I cannot seem to sort it out. I cannot either stretch time, or enlarge the house. That would take up precious time which I cannot afford."

Marco Bellocchio

“For me a film grows from an image.”

Mani Kaul

“I made films because I wanted to make films. I didn’t do it with the intention of giving the audience a message. The act of making a film is a social act.”

Mihalis Kakogiannis

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Michael Snow

“If there are ‘narrative cinema’ elements in my films I don’t want them to take you ‘elsewhere’ but to keep you here watching the film, a construct, an artificiality.”

Liu Jiayin