Sally Potter

“The next one I would pick out is Come and See. Come and See directed by Elem Klimov is I think the best anti-war film ever made. What I can tell you about Come and See is that the shoot took about a year and they stopped when it was time to evaluate. I think rethink. They would stop for a few weeks and think. When I heard this I thought luxury. The possibility of actually reflecting on what you're doing while you're shooting rather than being in this kind of mad sprint.”

“Now A Matter of Life and Death, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I was fortunate enough to get to know Michael Powell towards the end of his life. He was very helpful to me, something of a mentor. I told him A Matter of Life and Death was my favorite of his films and he said, 'But it is my favorite too.' And it is extraordinarily well written by Pressburger. It's in a way a courtroom drama about history and about the relationship and the influences of Europe on America and vice versa.”

“Now poking out at me here is Dance, Girl, Dance by Dorothy Arzner. That's an amazing film to see and an early female director who was doing really, really, really interesting things in a kind of modest but celebratory way.”

“Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold, incredibly interesting filmmaker. It's really exploring the life of a teenage girl as she struggles her way through the limitations that are imposed upon her by poverty and her life in Britain. But what she does, Andrea, so amazingly, she makes something that makes you fall in love with the people and their ability to survive despite their difficult situations. Beautifully crafted and it's beautifully shot.”

“La strada. Just have to say a lot of thing about La strada. I rediscovered early Fellini recently, and where I remember when I first saw Fellini thinking that this film was sentimental, when I saw it recently, no, it's not. It's not. So I then had to watch all of early Fellini again, of course, Eight and a Half and so on. So I'm sorry I've got back into it because it's difficult to say goodbye to such wonderful works.”

“I'm going to start with The Apu Trilogy. These are life-changing films that I've watched many times but you can't watch them too many times because they are themselves an Education in the compassionate gaze of the filmmaker.”