The only film ever directed by author/poet/playwright/activist Jean Genet, 1950s legendary Un chant d’amour was long suppressed by censors for its explicit homosexual content. In 1964, filmmaker Jonas Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges after a screening of the film alongside Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Mekas recalls how he smuggled the film into the U.S. in the first place:

"The film was in 35mm and it was bulky. I was afraid that if I went from Paris to New York the film would be confiscated. Customs was very strict. Twice when I came to New York from Paris I had some Olympia publications in my pocket and they were seized. So I said, ‘If I go to New York with this, I have no chance. I have to go first to London.’ And that’s what I did. I cut the film into three pieces and put them in my raincoat pockets, and went to London. When you come from Paris, [US] Customs says, ‘Oh, Paris, hum, Paris.’ If you come from London, well that’s more conservative and you have a chance to pass through.

"I was on the plane to New York from London and I was talking with my neighbor, who happened to be the playwright [Harold] Pinter. When I told him what I had in my pockets, he said, ‘Maybe you should let me go first. You come after me.’ So I followed him and we got to Customs and they opened Pinter’s suitcase. It was full of plays, copies of the same play. They said, ‘What’s this?’ ‘Oh, it’s my play’, he said. ‘It’s opening on Broadway.’ ‘Play! On Broadway!’ The Customs man got so gaga, so excited, that he motioned his neighbors [fellow officers]. They all converged and were so yapping with excitement that I just passed through. And that’s how the film got in the country. If I had been by myself, I don’t know what would have happened. So, thanks Pinter!"

Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the set of his film Veronika Voss. The film premiered in February 1982 and four months later, during the final stages of post-production on Querelle, Fassbinder died of an accidental drug overdose, the notes for his next film at his side.

Kenji Mizoguchi with actress Ayako Wakao, cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, and screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda during the production of the 1953 film Gion Bayashi.

Behind the scenes of Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

City of Pirates — dir. Raúl Ruiz

Filmmakers as children —
1: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Spike Lee
2: David Cronenberg, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sergei Eisenstein
3: Glauber Rocha, Věra Chytilová, Krzysztof Kieślowski
4: Shuji Terayama, Guru Dutt, Buster Keaton
5: Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Orson Welles, Jia Zhangke
6: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Agnès Varda
7: Sergei Parajanov, Larisa Shepitko, Ritwik Ghatak

Satyajit Ray designing, rehearsing, shooting, editing, and scoring his films from the late 1960s through the 1980s as captured by photographer Nemai Ghosh.