I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.

Losing hope means ceasing to love my son and my girlfriend and many friends and people around the world. We in Iraq have not descended from another planet. Just as people in many other countries have gotten over the tragedy of war, Iraq will get over its ordeal. I'm talking about the essence of humanity. Hope is mixed into the blood of every human being, everywhere and in every time.

Whenever we went out to film in the street we would end up in the police station and in the offices of some other security agency. They deliberately intimidated us. I moved to Kurdistan and changed my name and made my first feature film in Kurdistan with very basic resources.

In fact I didn't think about fear much at the time. I felt angry about everything that was happening around me: the violence of the dictatorship and the violence of society.

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.

The Arab world is full of corruption, in the time of the dictatorships and in the time of anarchy. This corruption is not only in politics and the economy, but also in the field of creative activity. There's an elite that controls the festivals, the newspapers, and the reviews. They are just a corrupt clique with no interest in creativity.

You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.