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.

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.

Palestine is about how we drink the water, whether we are being ecological or not. Palestine is our way of exercising our daily living. That's what's going to solve the problem of Palestine. It's also how we think of ourselves spiritually. This kind of disconnectedness is harmful to the person who is acting that way and is sometimes annoying.

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.

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.

Silence can be intimidating, sometimes provocative, sometimes a form of resistance because it dislocates.

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.