Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

Stan van der Beek

“No. Film is an art in evolution. It is the dark glass for the physical and visual change in motion about us. How is it then that we are suffocated with the cardboard cut-out poetry of Hollywood?”

Kenji Mizoguchi

“You must put the odor of the human body into images...describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel...there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.”

Nobuhiro Suwa

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.”

Lucrecia Martel

“From the very beginning, even when I’m writing, I think a lot about the sound. Many elements of my work in cinema come from oral storytelling and oral tradition. I think about sound and the rhythm of the sound.”

Aleksandr Sokurov

“The surface of the screen and that of the canvas are one and the same.”

Maurice Pialat

“What I try to do, with the actors' consent, is to create something by beginning with a set situation that we can deviate from in the course of the shoot. ”

Aki Kaurismäki

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

Ernst Lubitsch

“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.”

Audrius Stonys

“I love silence. Silence is a powerful tool in cinema language. It gives space for the imagination and contemplation. Silence is not a hole in a soundtrack. It has many colours and meanings.”

Jiří Menzel

“With his debut feature film Closely Watched Trains (1966), Czechoslovakian filmmaker Jirí Menzel became an important member in Czech New Wave cinema and won an Academy Award.”

Sergei Dvortsevoy

“Documentary for me is like some kind of absurdity. The worse for people it is, the better for the director. At the same time, the most interesting films you see are on the borderlines. Documentary is only on the borderlines for me.”

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.”

João César Monteiro

“I will be dust, but dust in love.”

Hong Sang-soo

“When I finish a film, I feel like I have overcome a certain hurdle. It's really good for me as a human being, and I hope that for some people, my films will do the same thing.”

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.”

Gunvor Nelson

“I have made both surrealistic and expressionistic films, but I prefer the term “personal film.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Jean Rouch

“I don’t think there’s any border between science and art. All the fiction films I have made were always on the same subject,—a discovery of the “Other,” an exploration of difference.”