Pamela Yates Quotes

#1. I'm an eclectic and avid filmgoer. I try to see everything from romantic comedies to blockbusters to art house films, world cinema and documentaries.

Pamela Yates

#2. Celebrate your victories and mark your defeats. Ultimately documentary filmmaking is not a job, it's a calling.

Pamela Yates

#3. The digital revolution has had a democratizing effect. Now anyone can be a filmmaker, but to be a good filmmaker is as hard as it ever was.

Pamela Yates

#4. I'm a storyteller who uses all of the beauty and power of cinema to tell tales of human struggles for positive social change.

Pamela Yates

#5. I believe that those who believe in the power of human rights must find new ways to address economic injustice - and on a scale commensurate with the millions of people around the world that are mired in poverty.

Pamela Yates

#6. Like a human rights lawyer who uses the law to rectify wrongs, I use filmic storytelling for the same effect.

Pamela Yates

#7. When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out.

Pamela Yates

#8. If you make a great film full of emotion, of pathos, people want to continue to know more, to work harder.

Pamela Yates

#9. Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.

Pamela Yates

#10. My advice to emerging documentary filmmakers would be: try to find other people, a group, a cooperative that you can work with. Filmmaking is hard and lonely and decidedly unglamorous. Find like-minded souls and share the joy and the misery.

Pamela Yates

#11. I truly value the cinema experience, the tribal gathering in the dark to watch something larger than life. I like to sit in the first row with no heads in front of mine, and become one with the screen. I always stay for the complete credits so I can linger in the film's story just a little longer.

Pamela Yates

#12. Everyone has access to a pen and paper, but to be a great writer is difficult.

Pamela Yates

#13. I'm both an artist / filmmaker and a human rights defender.

Pamela Yates

#14. Destiny doesn't control your life, but it does place you on a path. It's how you walk down that path that determines stories I tell.

Pamela Yates