"This is another film my grandfather showed me at a very young age. It was one of the first times I ever saw reality unfold like that on-screen. The more I watch it, the more that different things pop out. When I was young, this was the first time I ever saw an interaction between an African American and a young Italian kid—and that was big for me, because when I was in Italy my mother was always the only African American around and I was this young Italian kid. So seeing both these cultures represented, and seeing the way they’re represented, made me realize cinema could reflect life—that it’s not just about entertainment, that it can be about something very real. When you really think about the postwar years, the image of Italy was very much constructed through Rossellini films. In the era of Fascism, people like Rossellini and the partisan movement were silenced, so it’s not that they didn’t exist—it’s just that they weren’t allowed to be as vocal because their lives were at stake. The fact that he gave a voice to this movement, showing that Italy did in fact have this fiercely anti-Fascist side that suffered as much as anyone, I think was very important for how Italy has been seen in the postwar years. It’s one of those rare moments when a director has this deeply personal film to make that also coincides with one of the biggest events in world history. I’m definitely drawn to this tradition of filmmaking because I grew up on these films as much as I grew up on Disney."

"There's A Riot Goin' On is an abstract, nihilistic, urban death funk record. Sly documents the times better than anybody – 1971: the whole civil rights movement has been crushed by the murders of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and the whole American state dismantled the Black Panther party. Sly Stone documents the dread and the suffocation of those times. His music before that was transcendent and joyous with stuff like 'Everyday People', which was basically life-affirming music. Then from about 1969, '70, he starts to become darker with these new funk sounds. Even the hit single from the record, 'Family Affair', is dark. He would have never written that four years prior. It was like the utopian idealism of the '60s had gone and America was almost at war with itself. But Sly never made this a political record – his aim was to put the American flag on the cover with no writing on it. The lyrics were internalised, it was kind of like a closed-off, looking-inward record. There's no reverb on this record and it's completely dry. There's no real joy in the record."

"The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were leveled, humanity’s faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didn’t look away from harshness and violence—quite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance. I’m thinking of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51, the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world."