The problem of ISIS is not recent. Ever since the Second World War, people in this region have been, and are today, living under brutal dictatorships governed by nationalistic fervor. As for the Kurdish question: nobody from the Arab world is serious about fighting ISIS. It's only the Kurdish people who are standing firm against ISIS. And I think Europe, the United States, and most other democratic countries of the world are beginning to look at the Kurds in another way. The Kurds are really becoming their partners in the region.
After school, I went to Damascus to study law and history, which I didn't really like. I didn't like history, in particular. In Syria, the regime was trying to present to us a distorted version of the past. Assad was shown as the father of history. So I decided to shift to film, which was something I had always loved as a teenager.
Now the world believes in Kurds, as they have become partners in that region. The West doesn't believe in the Iraqi government - not in Maliki before or Abadi today. It doesn't believe in Syria in any way, nor in Iran. So the Kurds could maybe work together with the Western world to bring stability to the region. It's a nice change, coming as it is after hundreds of years of the struggle of the Kurds.
I dream about going back, but I know that it isn't easy. Thirty years of being in Europe has changed my life. I am not the Kurd from Syria anymore as I was before. Kurdistani Syria developed somewhere, and I developed elsewhere. I think we will not find each other easily again. If I go back I will be a foreigner in my own country now. But of course it remains a dream to make another movie in Syria, and I am waiting for that opportunity.
When I see that people are touched, and they feel solidarity with him, I say to myself, "I made a little change."
Even if you make a movie about a criminal locked up in prison, you may not support him as a criminal, but you have to like him on some level. You have to love your protagonist and respect him. He will only open his heart to you when he believes that you are treating him with respect, with love. Only then will there be no more walls between the filmmaker and the protagonist.
In all my documentaries, I have great respect for the people I work with. Really, I love them. And it's very important for me that when I finish a movie, they stay my friends. It's important that they won't feel that I in any way manipulated them or showed them in a bad light. I want to show them in all their reality - not as subjects but as people with flesh and blood - but I want to do this with all my respect.
Documentary has been a way for me to establish myself as a filmmaker. It's my way of proving that I have a language, that I can say something through film.
Most people look at a feature film and say, "It's just a movie." For me there is no border or wall between fiction and documentary filmmaking. In documentaries, you have to deal with real people and their real feelings - you are working with real laughter, happiness, sadness. To try to reflect the reality is not the same as reality itself. That's why I think that making a good documentary is much harder than making a good feature film.
With fiction, you are creating an imaginary world. And it can be a very mechanical process. In a fictional film, you create the characters who become "real people" when facing the camera. When you stop shooting, they change their costumes and become someone else. And people tend to believe in documentary more than fiction. Even if the fiction is based on a true story, everybody will say, "Oh, they're only actors."
It's difficult to make movies. For me it was easier, as a refugee in Switzerland, to make documentary films, because I didn't need a lot of money for it. The way I tell my story or my opinion would be very similar in both fiction and documentary forms. But I found I could speak more effectively to convey this brutal reality through documentary than I could through fiction.
If my friends are going to the mountains with guns to fight, I will continue that fight, not with guns but with a camera.
Sitting in the darkness of the cinema, I got to see another world. This imaginary world was a refuge for many of us. Of course, the films were controlled and censored by the regime. But I still thought, around this time, that maybe making films would be good for me. I thought of expressing myself through this medium, and of doing something for the Kurds. The options were clear: either I'd work as a lawyer under the Baath regime or make movies independently.
I am not saying that the Kurds are angels, but they have suffered too much. These people have a right to live in their country. The right just to be where they are, in freedom. And now the world has started believing in this. Kurdistan is coming. In some five years, I hope, we will have a flag in New York, hanging with all the other flags.
