to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.

A film in cinema is what in theatre would be realism — and vice versa.
In cinema — as in life — the text, the words, are refracted in everything
apart from the words themselves. The words mean nothing — words are water.

Cinema takes me to another world. That world is authentic, real, and welcoming. Cinema doesn’t belong to the winner but to the loser/loner. The blissful loser. I like that world.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

You'll leave this theatre in a different state.

What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.

Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus

The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story.

I know, these Hindi movies are crap, but they do kind of take your mind away from the crap of real life like nothing else.

I don’t think being able to see is the only thing cinema can offer. Other than that, it’s a media that lets you feel. The world portrayed on screen is something that’s seen, but what you hear and how you feel comes from a 2D screen to the 3D world we really live in. Cinema reminds us of this fact because the visually impaired live in this big world that is cinema. They feel cinema as if they are lying in the cinema itself, so by having audio help there’s the possibly that they understand the film even more than those who do not. I was talking to the producers of audio guides and their love for cinema was very close to mine. These encounters instigated the making of this film. (about the portrayal of visually impaired people in Hikari (Radiance), and how or in what ways cinema can relate to them)

Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.

The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now.

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.