Andrzej Wajda

In the first years after 1989, films were partly financed from the state's budget as well as by public television. Still, except for a few special cases, most films are made this way.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking.

With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.

We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.