Before I understood language, I understood light. The way it moves across a wall. The way shadows stretch and compress time. Before I could hold a pencil correctly, I was composing frames in my head, looking through windows as if they were viewfinders.
Filmmaking came to me not as a skill but as a necessity. A new alphabet. One I could finally read. In images, I found fluency. In sound, rhythm. In the interplay between the two, meaning.
I began to understand that editing wasn’t just a technical process; it was a form of thinking. Of sculpting time. Of creating emotional logic when linear logic failed. I could express nuance through a single cut, suggest a revolution through a moment of silence. I could build whole arguments, stories, entire inner worlds, without needing a single word.
Sound, for me, has always been a form of intimacy. An invisible architecture. It touches the body before it touches the mind. It bypasses resistance. I approach sound design not as decoration but as revelation. I tune into frequencies that carry emotion, memory, history. In the right hands, a whisper can be louder than a scream.
Images, too, have a frequency. A spirit. I don’t just shoot what I see. I try to capture what is felt but not yet formed. What is sacred. What is buried beneath language. I believe images can heal. That they can disrupt. That they can carry the soul of a moment into another life, another time, another mind.
As someone whose early years were shaped by dyslexia and war, filmmaking didn’t just feel like communication. It felt like healing. Like reclaiming authorship over a narrative that had long been told to me. Through the camera, I wasn’t just watching; I was witnessing. And more importantly, I was being witnessed back.
For me, filmmaking was never just about art. It was about survival. About translation. About taking everything I had seen and felt, the fragmentation of war, the alienation of dyslexia, the injustice of the world, and turning it into something that could be witnessed. Understood. Felt.
Growing up in a post-war Lebanon that never truly healed, I became fluent in the language of silence, of things not said, of wounds not named. Filmmaking gave me a way to speak into that silence. To fill the void with meaning. I didn’t just want to express myself… I needed to. Because expression, for me, wasn’t a luxury. It was a lifeline.
Stories became my resistance. Not against any one person, but against erasure. Against apathy. Against systems that normalize suffering. Against the kind of world where children grow up amid rubble and are expected to just get on with it.
My camera was never neutral. It was a tool of witnessing and a weapon of love. I used it not to aestheticize pain but to honor it. To frame dignity where others saw pity. I was drawn to the voices no one wanted to hear: the refugee child in the corner of the street, the queer soul hiding in plain sight, the migrant trapped in legal limbo, the woman silenced by custom and law. These were not distant subjects. They were my friends. My mirrors. My family.
I remember in 2017 the first time I filmed Maram, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee girl selling flowers in Hamra to support her family. She had a look in her eyes that I will never forget, a mixture of exhaustion, resilience, and something unbreakable.
Two years later, I cast her in Abandoned, a fictional narrative short that explored Lebanon’s gender-biased laws and how they funnel young girls into street life. She wasn’t acting. She was reclaiming. That film became a quiet rebellion against a broken legal system, seen through the eyes of someone it failed.
I lost contact with Maram in 2020, after the Lebanese economy crumbled and the world folded in on itself under lockdown. Then, in 2024, she found me again, just weeks before the sky turned red with bombs once more. We sat together in a small café, the weight of years between us, and she told me her story, not the one I had known, but everything that had happened in the silence that followed, what she had endured as a female was beyond words, harrowing, shattering, intimate in its brutality.
We began filming again. Not as an act of documentation, but of defiance. As the sound of airstrikes echoed around us, her story unfolded, not as a metaphor, but as lived truth. The violence of war outside mirrored the violence she had carried inside. And yet, she stood before the camera with the same unbreakable gaze I remembered. Still standing. Still speaking. Still demanding to be seen. And thus Maram: Between Shadow & Light came to be.
These are among the experiences that changed me. They taught me that my job wasn’t to speak for anyone, it was to listen so deeply that their truth could come through without distortion. To create a space where vulnerability was power, not weakness.
I began to understand that justice starts with seeing, and that most people are taught not to see. Not really! Denial! That famous Lebanese trait we so excel at. So I started making films that forced people to look. To feel. Because when someone feels, they can’t unfeel. And that’s where transformation begins.
My documentaries, narrative films, experimental pieces, they all come from the same impulse: to reveal what’s hidden. To question the systems we inherit. To challenge the comfort of neutrality. I don’t create from a pedestal. I create from the ground, with the people, in the mess of things. With empathy. With urgency. With accountability.
Some people make films to escape reality. I make them to confront it. To unearth beauty in the wreckage. To stitch new possibilities into the fabric of what is. Because I believe deeply that the role of the artist is not just to reflect the world but to reshape it.
In this way, filmmaking became more than a career. It became a spiritual practice. An ethical stance. A radical act of hope.
