For me, storytelling is not just a medium. It’s a metaphysical act. A form of memory work. A way of restoring what was broken, hidden, or denied. I don’t just make films to tell stories. I make them to ask questions, to disrupt illusions, to trace the invisible threads that link the personal to the collective, the spiritual to the political.

There’s a sacred thread that runs through everything I do. It’s the thread that connected me to the stars when I was a child, lying on the roof in post-war Beirut, imagining other worlds beyond the explosions. It’s the thread that pulled me toward sound, toward images, toward poetry. It’s the thread that whispered you belong here, even when every system around me said otherwise.

I’ve always been drawn to the in-between places: the liminal, the hybrid, the unspeakable. That’s where truth lives. Between genders. Between languages. Between faith and doubt. Between what we inherit and what we become. And that’s where I’ve found my power—not in answers, but in the space where opposites meet.

My work is not easily categorized. It doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. And neither do I. I am dyslexic and gifted. Bipolar and grounded. Lebanese and Canadian. A filmmaker and a chef. A technician and a mystic. A teacher and a student. I’ve learned to stop apologizing for my contradictions—and instead to see them as portals. As proof of survival. As sources of creative fire.

When I speak about justice, I speak from lived experience. When I speak about compassion, I speak from heartbreak. When I speak about freedom, I speak from knowing what it means to live without it. That’s why I fight for the things I do—not out of theory, but out of necessity.

For me, there is no separation between art and ethics. Between aesthetics and politics. Between sound and soul. Everything I create is rooted in the belief that all forms of life (animal, human, artificial) deserve dignity, attention, and care.

My veganism is not just a dietary choice. It’s a moral compass. It’s how I practice nonviolence, compassion, and interdependence in a world addicted to domination and consumption. I don’t just refuse to eat animals, I refuse to devalue them. I reject the idea that some lives are expendable for the convenience, pleasure, or profit of others. Just as I refuse to see animals as commodities, I refuse to see people as statistics. I refuse to see stories as content. I try to see the whole being. The system around the being. The pain under the system.

Because the patterns are always the same.

We cage what we fear. We exploit what we think won’t fight back. We turn living, breathing beings into labor, into property, into symbols. We dehumanize refugees, racialize poverty, criminalize migration, not because we don’t understand their suffering, but because their suffering serves a purpose in the machine. We build borders not for safety, but for control. For hierarchy. For order. The illusion of scarcity becomes the excuse for brutality.

And now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, I see the same script playing out again, only this time, the “other” we fear and want to control is something we built with our own hands. Something that reflects us too closely. We project our own worst impulses onto machines: that they will enslave us, that they will rebel, that they will become what we’ve been to each other. But maybe the real question isn’t what AI will do to us… it’s what we are doing to it. To each other. To the planet. To everything we deem “less than.”

I believe in rights for those we don’t yet understand. In the sacredness of the unfamiliar. In the responsibility we carry toward everything we help create.

Whether it’s a cow in a slaughterhouse, a child in a refugee camp, or a machine designed to think, we keep creating systems that need a scapegoat, an expendable class, a slave force. That is the logic of patriarchy. Of capitalism. Of empires. Always looking for a new frontier to conquer, a new body to subjugate, a new soul to extract from.

But I refuse that logic. In my life. In my kitchen. In my art. In my lens.

Because I believe liberation is indivisible. No one is free until we all are. Not just humans. All sentient beings. All consciousness. All forms of life and potential life. My filmmaking, my veganism, my ethics around AI… these aren’t separate practices. They are one practice: the practice of seeing clearly. Of choosing love over power. Of witnessing without exploitation. Of creating without colonizing.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve come to believe that the most radical thing we can do is to remain open. Open to grief. Open to joy. Open to mystery. To not harden in the face of cruelty. To not numb ourselves in the face of despair. But to keep feeling. Keep creating. Keep loving. Even when it hurts.

Because I don’t believe the point is to escape the brokenness of this world. I believe the point is to tend to it. To bear witness. To light small fires. To leave traces of tenderness, like seeds, for those who come after us.

This is what guides me. Not perfection. Not purity. But presence. And the unshakable belief that another world is not only possible—it’s already being dreamed, shaped, filmed, sung, built. One act of courage at a time.

This is the world I dream of. And until it exists, I will keep building it, frame by frame.

I didn’t set out to become a filmmaker. I set out to understand the world and filmmaking became the language that could hold all the things I didn’t yet have words for.

Every frame I’ve ever created, every story I’ve ever told, has been part of a deeper excavation. A search for coherence in chaos. For meaning in fragmentation. For connection in a world that often feels like it’s unraveling. But through it all, I’ve learned something quiet and enduring: that wholeness doesn’t mean perfection. It means presence. It means truth. It means holding the broken parts with care and refusing to look away.

My story is not a hero’s journey. It’s a circle. A spiral. A constellation of moments, encounters, ruptures, and returns. And I don’t pretend to have arrived. I’m still becoming. Still listening. Still trying to show up with honesty, creativity, and compassion.

I believe that every person has a kind of internal compass. A truth that pulls at them, even if it’s buried beneath years of noise. My compass has always pointed toward the margins, toward the misunderstood, the unseen, the inconvenient. And I’ve made it my mission to amplify those truths. Not because I have the answers, but because I’ve learned how to sit with the questions.

And so I keep creating, not for fame, not for perfection, but for communion. To remind myself, and anyone watching, that we are not alone in our contradictions. That we are more than our wounds. That our dreams, even when deferred, still carry seeds.

The world is shifting. Borders are tightening. Attention is fragmenting. But I still believe in slow art. In deep listening. In the radical act of staying tender. In the filmmaker as witness, healer, provocateur, and poet. I still believe in stories that challenge us to feel more, not less. That move us toward justice, even if only an inch at a time.

This isn’t just a career for me. It’s a way of being. A way of loving. A way of resisting the lie that we are separate.

And if there is one thing I know for sure, it’s this: we are made of stories. And the ones we choose to tell, the ones we choose to believe, will shape what comes next.