"Like many of the films on this list, Arabian Nights showed me that the possibilities of working with narrative are the possibilities of working with the world. This film makes beautiful use of a documentary approach to filmmaking but within the framework of fiction. It’s filled with these faces you don’t generally see in cinema, faces that remind me of people from that region in Italy. I’m not Italian, but there’s something there that made me feel, as a Brazilian, that I was connected to these faces and these characters. It’s also a fantastic way of looking at a classic piece of literature—I am a big fan of One Thousand and One Nights, and this is an adaptation you can connect to, that doesn’t feel far away at all. There’s a sexiness and a rawness, and a sense of pulsating reality being brought to the screen on a poetic level."

"Gertrud is so interesting because it’s a film that seems to be so close to literature, so bare cinematically, austere in every sense apart from words. There are so many of them, and the events are completely dramatic and constructed. But Dreyer, being one of the best filmmakers in all of history, manages to make a truly cinematic film. Everything that you hear and everything that you see transcends its significance as information and becomes meaningful in itself. It starts feeling like you’re experiencing life, not just living sentimentally in someone else’s drama. I think it took ten years to make the film, and it shows—not in how spectacular it is but in how everything is so subtle and so well designed, so well prepared. Everything has a reason, and that reason makes the film strong and unique, and you can feel that without anything being pushed."