In all my documentaries, I have great respect for the people I work with. Really, I love them. And it's very important for me that when I finish a movie, they stay my friends. It's important that they won't feel that I in any way manipulated them or showed them in a bad light. I want to show them in all their reality - not as subjects but as people with flesh and blood - but I want to do this with all my respect.

Documentary has been a way for me to establish myself as a filmmaker. It's my way of proving that I have a language, that I can say something through film.

Sitting in the darkness of the cinema, I got to see another world. This imaginary world was a refuge for many of us. Of course, the films were controlled and censored by the regime. But I still thought, around this time, that maybe making films would be good for me. I thought of expressing myself through this medium, and of doing something for the Kurds. The options were clear: either I'd work as a lawyer under the Baath regime or make movies independently.

With fiction, you are creating an imaginary world. And it can be a very mechanical process. In a fictional film, you create the characters who become "real people" when facing the camera. When you stop shooting, they change their costumes and become someone else. And people tend to believe in documentary more than fiction. Even if the fiction is based on a true story, everybody will say, "Oh, they're only actors."

Now the world believes in Kurds, as they have become partners in that region. The West doesn't believe in the Iraqi government - not in Maliki before or Abadi today. It doesn't believe in Syria in any way, nor in Iran. So the Kurds could maybe work together with the Western world to bring stability to the region. It's a nice change, coming as it is after hundreds of years of the struggle of the Kurds.

Most people look at a feature film and say, "It's just a movie." For me there is no border or wall between fiction and documentary filmmaking. In documentaries, you have to deal with real people and their real feelings - you are working with real laughter, happiness, sadness. To try to reflect the reality is not the same as reality itself. That's why I think that making a good documentary is much harder than making a good feature film.

After school, I went to Damascus to study law and history, which I didn't really like. I didn't like history, in particular. In Syria, the regime was trying to present to us a distorted version of the past. Assad was shown as the father of history. So I decided to shift to film, which was something I had always loved as a teenager.