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.”

Robert Hamer

Philippe Grandrieux

“I never watched any rushes. Because I frame the shots and operate the camera, the images are directly inscribed on my retina.”

Chantal Akerman

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

Han Hyeong-mo

Haile Gerima

“For me, to tell a story means however irrelevant society thinks it is, as long as it’s resonating with you, there’s some force wanting to tell it. And if society doesn’t want to hear it today, they might listen to it a hundred years from now.”

Carlos Saura

“...my work has a coherence within its incoherence because I've decided to work with elements that I know to the core, to work with characters and settings I've lived with.”

Đặng Nhật Minh

“I have no regrets at all about being a film director as it is destiny. But if I could choose again, I would rather be a doctor and follow in my father’s footsteps.”

Tapan Sinha

Věra Chytilová

“I have no desire to cuddle my audience.”

Ágnes Hranitzky

Márta Mészáros

“A person cannot be freed of their roots.”

So Yong Kim

[on casting "Treeless Mountain"] "When I met Hee Yeon, I knew she would be perfect. She had this unusual self-confidence and strength. From our first interview, Hee Yeon challenged me in a way that young Korean children do not normally question authority. I discovered Song Hee, who plays Bin, through a photograph which was sent to me by my assistant in Korea. I fell in love with her face."

Mark Rappaport

“Because various projects fell through I said, Oh, fuck this, I can’t stand this, waiting on other people’s money and for this person to like it and that person to like it and the other person to jump on board. I’m going to do something I can do at home by myself that’s going to cost me 25 cents and to hell with the big production that’ll never get made.”

Huang Weikai

“I told myself not to be concerned with what a documentary “should be like”, or to worry about the meaning of “vérité” or “truth.” Both a documentary and a feature are films observing different sets of rules.”

King Hu

“I don't like James Bond. They made him a super hero, but he is just an agent, a human being. In my movies, secret agents are more realistic, I didn't want to portray them in the most glowing colours. ”

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.”

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.”

Segundo de Chomón

Martin Arnold

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”