Roger Ross Williams

“I have learned that the hardest part of campaigning for tolerance and justice is encouraging people to look at their own selves, to examine their own identity and shortcomings.”

“I didn't have a lot of exposure to films as a kid, and I never went to the cinema. I had a single mom who just planted me in front of the television. But while growing up, I lived in my own fantasy world.”

“I made a film about a person living with a disability. Those kinds of films are often about the disability, not who a person is.”

“I would be remiss if I didn't say that it has been troubling for me to work within an institution that does not seem to recognize that I am a statistic.”

“I had my own Land of Lost Sidekicks, where I pretended I lived in Paris with my best friend, a little cowboy based on a Marky Maypo doll.”

“I can't believe that I'm sitting in meetings with Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Annette Bening. I want to take on that responsibility to represent all the Rogers out there who don't have a seat at the table. People of colour were not at the table, and now I am there, I want to change things.”

“When I was in high school, I felt totally alienated from the world, but I loved movies. They were my escape, but coming from a disadvantaged community, I never knew that filmmaking was an option for me. A program like School of Doc would have been a game-changer.”

“I'm definitely drawn to stories about outsiders. Feeling like that myself as a gay black man, I often seek to give a voice to those in the world who don't have one.”

“The war against homosexuality in Uganda is fueled by the funds of American Christian missionary churches.”

“While shooting in Uganda in 2011, the conservative evangelical pastors I was filming - the most ardent supporters of the country's now infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill - discovered that I myself am gay.”

“I will always make films that champion outsiders, because I still feel like one, even though I'm now governor of the documentary branch of the Academy.”

“I want to look at the community I came from and what role incarceration has played there.”

“Even after I won the Oscar, my phone did not ring. No one called me to fund films or offer projects.”

“I grew up in a Southern Baptist-style church with a choir, a band, and music, but I've been asking myself my whole life, 'Why is my own church, my own community, rejecting me because of my sexuality?'”

“Wiseman's films are some of the most pure cinema, and to take a journey in a Wiseman film is like no other. He's been doing it so long, with a body of over 40 films!”

“The relationship between a director and an editor in documentaries is so important.”

“When I decided to make 'Blackface,' a short film about Black Pete, I had little knowledge of the giant cesspool of hate I was about to dive into. I didn't realize how popular and passionate many white Dutch are about a figure that they connect to fond memories from their childhood.”

“Gay Africans must speak up and let everyone know they are there, they have always been there, and that they are not going away.”

“I grew up poor, black, and working class.”

“When I was filming 'Prudence' in Zimbabwe, I noticed the hold fundamentalist Christianity had on sub-Saharan Africa. So I thought I'd like to make a film about religion in Africa because the prosperity gospel is big business where people are desperate, poor, and sick.”