When I see that people are touched, and they feel solidarity with him, I say to myself, "I made a little change."

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.

When I see that people are touched, and they feel solidarity with him, I say to myself, "I made a little change."

It's difficult to make movies. For me it was easier, as a refugee in Switzerland, to make documentary films, because I didn't need a lot of money for it. The way I tell my story or my opinion would be very similar in both fiction and documentary forms. But I found I could speak more effectively to convey this brutal reality through documentary than I could through fiction.

If my friends are going to the mountains with guns to fight, I will continue that fight, not with guns but with a camera.

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.

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.