The desire to express in an art form and to compose a tableau and vignette whether it's humorous, burlesque, or poetic comes simply from a desire to compose an image for cinema. It is not my fault that when I go to Ramallah there is a checkpoint and therefore it enters my film. Tell me a way to avoid that politicized image. The fact is that the police are everywhere, the army everywhere and occupation is total. Whether it's a love story or a thriller, you place the camera and these realities will cross the frame.

To think of a film from the point of view of a tank barrel is already so inhumanly positioned. This is when film can reveal itself scandalously.

I don't want what you see on the screen to just be a brief notion of pleasure but something that lingers. The idea is to have the images revisited. I want it to be something that also enhances the soul. I want the moment of pleasure to produce an attachment.

I am more at peace than I've ever known myself to be. My connectedness to the world is more intense. I am more attentive to the humanity around me.

A lot of narrative films leave you no space for anything else but eating popcorn. I want to go in the complete opposite direction. I have to evacuate all psychology, to be less a protagonist and more a presence.

If a person just takes what is socio-political and geographical from the themes of my films then that's not enough. But if the person goes out of the theatre and, for example, makes the dinner he's eating later on, extra nice then I feel that I have succeeded. We have this urge to anaesthetize the moment we're living in.

Living more intensely, more lovingly, with more camaraderie, that is in itself resistance.