Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

Ágnes Hranitzky

Agustí Villaronga

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.”

Margarethe von Trotta

“I think it was a little bit of destiny or some angel who pushed me, knowing one day I would get my chance.”

Jerzy Skolimowski

Jonas Mekas

“In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!”

Joris Ivens

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

Chantal Akerman

“When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.”

Jerzy Kawalerowicz

[On his film Quo Vadis] "It is about a growing religion in opposition to barbarianism. It humanized the barbarian world, and that is what the film is about. I am always looking for universal problems in my films."

Krzysztof Zanussi

“A film about hope, life and death — therefore about everything which is important.”

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

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.”

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

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.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Víctor Erice

“I think that among the arts, cinema is the least known. Its history is generally ignored, and so is, above all, its real nature. As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”