All Quotes

Maybe it's the music that enables them to function like that, to always take everything as it comes and never complain about the misery, hardship or injustice. ”

It's very hard to find critics or a magazine today that will publish material that is genuinely independent and written without any concern about being cut off some distributor's list or not be invited or flown into screenings. ”

In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance. ”

I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things. ”

The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in. ”

Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money. ”

For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it. ”

But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive. ”

Ibrahim tells his story without a grain of complaint, and this was true for all of the band members. This is very much part of the Cuban spirit and soul. ”

So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true. ”