I'm not in the business of saying just one thing about just one place. If you only see Palestine in my films, then I've failed because then I'm just a provincial filmmaker.

I don't particularly have a good memory. I think history is many times just the text written by the victors. I wanted to counter that aspect.

It's a false illusion that we wake up thinking of who we are in terms of identity and that we are stuck in the boundaries of who we are nationalistically.

The Time that Remains is a way of interpreting a certain ambience or emotion. These are the stories that my father told me over the course of fifteen or twenty years. I used to listen to him. From the cowardly part of my character, I'm always in fear of not telling the right story. I'm not interested in making epics.

I'm trying to use Palestine as a microcosm of the world, but maybe the world is a microcosm of Palestine. We're living in a moment that has lost attachment to the ideology behind boundaries.

It's crucial to choose your work place - some places lend themselves to you and others don't.

Israel, the Israelis, and the rest of the world have been brainwashed. They don't think of pre-1948, they have no idea Palestinians were in Israel, who we were before '48. As if we were born in 1948 according to them. They have no notion that we had a country, houses, rebelled against the Ottomans and the British. They think history in that region started in that moment.