Teaching didn’t come to me as a career move; it arrived as a calling. I never set out to become an educator. But when you’ve lived on the margins, when you’ve fought to carve a path through silence, misrecognition, and contradiction, you start to notice how many others are still stuck there. And eventually, you feel the need to reach back. To say: Here’s what helped me. Here’s what I’ve learned. Let me walk beside you for a while.

I didn’t grow up with models of what empowered education looked like. Most of what I learned that saved me, I learned outside the classroom. So when I stepped into a teaching role, I knew I couldn’t replicate the same system that had failed me. I had to teach differently. Listen harder. Lead gently.

I didn’t see my students as vessels to fill or as boxes to check. I saw them as whole beings with stories, contradictions, and power. Some of them, like me, had been misread their entire lives, by schools, by parents, by society. My job wasn’t to fix them. It was to help them see what was already there.

I began developing workshops that wove together craft and consciousness, whether it was film editing, sound design, or visual storytelling. The technical skills mattered, of course, but I always paired them with deeper questions: What is this story doing to the world? Who is being centered or erased? What is your responsibility as a creator?

Over time, it became clear to me that teaching was another form of filmmaking. It was storytelling in real time. It was about guiding someone into their own voice. And just like in my films, I wasn’t the hero; I was the witness, the space-holder, the one who believed in what was possible even before they did.

When I co-founded the Beirut Film Center, it wasn’t about building an institution; it was about building a home. A place where marginalized voices could find tools, training, and community. A space where education wasn’t transactional, but transformative. Where craft met consciousness. Where students didn’t have to leave parts of themselves at the door to be taken seriously.

And in every class I teach, every one-on-one conversation I have with a student, I carry that same quiet rebellion: that we don’t have to repeat the systems that failed us. We can imagine better ones. And we can build them together.