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

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.

I am not saying that the Kurds are angels, but they have suffered too much. These people have a right to live in their country. The right just to be where they are, in freedom. And now the world has started believing in this. Kurdistan is coming. In some five years, I hope, we will have a flag in New York, hanging with all the other flags.

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

Even if you make a movie about a criminal locked up in prison, you may not support him as a criminal, but you have to like him on some level. You have to love your protagonist and respect him. He will only open his heart to you when he believes that you are treating him with respect, with love. Only then will there be no more walls between the filmmaker and the protagonist.

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."