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.

I dream about going back, but I know that it isn't easy. Thirty years of being in Europe has changed my life. I am not the Kurd from Syria anymore as I was before. Kurdistani Syria developed somewhere, and I developed elsewhere. I think we will not find each other easily again. If I go back I will be a foreigner in my own country now. But of course it remains a dream to make another movie in Syria, and I am waiting for that opportunity.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."