I don't think you can strategize to be poetic and neither can you strategize to be funny. It is not a tool, it is itself - it comes from the moment, from the character, from the background, from the streets.

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

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.

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.

Palestine is an extremely familiar place to me. Someone like me who lives everywhere in the world cannot be contained. If my hope and ambitions are in the right place, you can judge that in my films. I want to make films that diffuse any local notion. Cinema criss-crosses borders and check points. If the film is good, then it's universal.

The problem is that when you grow absolutely certain that all authorities are corrupt, then that would include the Palestinian authorities as well.

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.