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.

For seven years I wrote and published my texts on the Internet and no Arab festival invited me and no Arab publishing house wanted to publish my books, and I wasn't known in the Western world because of my political positions.

Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality.

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

It's true that we in Iraq are now paying a heavy price as a consequence of senseless violence, but nonetheless there are many positive things happening generally on the part of people in Arab countries who were living in darkness and absolute silence because of dictatorship. The people in Arab countries are now speaking out and asking many questions about human rights, minorities, religion, democracy, "the other," and so on.

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.

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.