Rencana mengenai Yasmin Ahmad di NST 14 Jun

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Petikan-petikan yang menarik;

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"If it had won I would have been deeply embarrassed. If you saw the top three films you'd understand why."

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One of the things she learnt from attending those festivals and meeting filmmakers from different parts of the world was that "they're not interested in complaining or restrictions or budget limitations. They just want to talk about ideas with you, which was just wonderful.

"It was such a nice change because over here whenever I talk to fellow filmmakers, they're always complaining about budgets, how the government is not helping and how strict the Censorship Board is."

"So I told my friends here 'Let's stop complaining, let's just make films. There's a whole bunch of us ... me, Yuhang, James (Lee), Amir (Muhammad), Osman Ali. We just want to make films."

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But not the kind with Erra Fazira in them, says Yasmin.

She quickly points out: "There are already people making those films and some of them are quite fun to watch. But we don't want to make those kinds of films. We want to make films about our own lives."

She quotes a Spanish filmmaker who says a nation is nothing without the story it tells about itself.

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"(Datuk) Lat does it through his cartoons and I try to do it in Petronas commercials. But we don't really have films that tell stories about ourselves. Our films tell stories of middle-class fantasies."

She adds that there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that she doesn't want to go there. "I want to make films about lower to middle-class realities. I'm not interested in making films about the upper class because I think they lead such boring lives.

"James is telling stories about the Chinese community and that's just wonderful. And Amir ... well, Amir is very courageous. He's telling stories about political upheavals and stuff like that."