“We were being chased to the airport by a bunch of chimeres, and people were being shot on the streets. Just at the airport, in front of the terminal, a guy got shot right when we arrived.”

I don't know if Denmark’s Asger Leth has ever actually said he would die for his art. Actions speak louder than words, though, and while making the controversial documentary Ghosts of Cite Soleil, Leth often wondered if he and his co-director/ cinematographer, Milos Loncarevic, would live long enough to finish the project. To get film in the can they risked going home in a box.

“I’ve probably been over preoccupied with death. I think about it unhealthily too much. Actually, I think I see it as an ashes-to-ashes grand recycling scheme that when we die our body goes into the soil and a tree grows and the fruit grows and a bird eats from the tree, and you go round and round and round.”

When I came out on the stretcher I didn't know the towers were down. I thought it was car bombs that went off. When I got trapped I was in my own little world. So not only didn't I know the towers had come down, I had no idea of the magnitude of the event at that time. I only found that out months later. It obviously upset me because it was very personal to me. This wasn't just an event where nearly 3000 people died, but it had over 30 of my personal friends die. Plus I lost three men that I had personally brought into that building. So it was very personal.

I knew these officers, I worked with them, I was comfortable and confident that these were the type of men that with direction were going to do the job right. So I was comfortable that we would be able to handle whatever we came across. It was just circumstances turned out beyond any of our control and tragic things ended up happening.

"The desire for belief is a serious concern. It's an important theme here. Faith, the function of faith, and the meaning of belief, believing in belief, is a concern of ours. The mechanics of it, how does it work? An important American writer, Flannery O'Connor, has been an important influence on my creative life. I wrote a Cum Laude thesis on her at Harvard and I've read every word she wrote, two or three times, and when you mention the word belief or faith, I would offer her definition of it, which is: faith is that which you know to be true, whether you believe it or not."

The experiences of Oscar Torres, the writer of Innocent Voices, offer a salutary lesson about how even an obscene situation can appear normal to people denied a glimpse of a different reality. Torres based the film on his childhood during the civil war in El Salvador. Then, it was normal to have to cower underneath a bed as bullets burst through his house during fire fights between FMLN guerrillas and government soldiers; normal to see bodies in the street; normal to have to rush home in time for curfew; normal for boys to be rounded up for military service when they turned 12.

"I've heard Richard Linklater say that in the States certain civil liberties are being taken away under the guise of safety - ‘We have your best interests and your protection [at heart]' - and it's becoming more and more not innocent until proven guilty, but you're guilty until proven innocent. I think A Scanner Darkly is kind of quietly dealing with some of those themes. Or something to get out of it is something kind of like, ‘Hey, you know the scene where that man who is on the street with the megaphone is being taken away by the police? You can't dissent.' So there is a little bit of a warning, I think, going on in the film. I think a lot of people, probably in their day to day lives in America now, are ill at ease. I know with my friends and everyone there's a ‘when is the shoe going to drop?' kind of thing. So everyone's not like running around all happy. And in terms of being safe, I don't think people feel at bottom safe."   

The critics sniffed snobbishly at V for Vendetta, but it could just be the most subversive political film of the Bush/Blair era. By turns thoughtful and aggressive, Vendetta cuts through neo-con double-speak and inspiringly rehabilitates words such as "freedom" and "democracy" by re-investing them with their true meaning. Most impressive of all, it dares to question what separates a terrorist from a freedom fighter, and vice a versa, and to ask whether sometimes it is not only just a matter of defintion, but of who is doing the defining. Incredibly, few critics talked about the film's political import upon its release, approaching it as merely just another (supposedly) verbose action movie from the makers of the Matrix. Get revolutionary and check it out for yourself on DVD, now.

"One of the main reasons why I wanted to make the film is because the Civil War's still going on in America. There's still many people that want to hold onto the Confederacy as this great concept that had nothing to do with slavery. But if you honestly look at history, and you read books outside of battlefield books, you quickly find out that it was all about slavery. So that's the chief reason why I wanted to make the film, to finally give the history of America from this other point of view. The Confederate flag still flies over the State of Mississippi, over the State House. You still see it on a lot of people's cars and trucks. You still see Hollywood making movies that celebrate the Confederacy, in various ways, as a sad, lost cause. A great civilisation gone with the wind, as Gone with the Wind calls it. But from the slave point of view, there's nothing civilised about it. "

"Zero Day could never have been made in Hollywood. Elephant [Gus Van Sant‘s Columbine-inspired film], I don't think, could even have been made in Hollywood. The larger studios would never touch it. Not before. Not after. Maybe in a long time from now. I remember watching Columbine on television and thinking to myself, ‘God, someday somebody's going to make some awful Columbine epic and it's going to stress the heroism of the day, however they find it.' Not that there wasn't heroism, I'm not trying to make light of the people that did heroic things in real life, but that, to me, is unfortunately not the significant story. It is a significant story, and someone could tell that, definitely. But I think the thing that America is culturally reeling from is, how could this happen? Why would this happen? And what, if anything, can we take away from this?"