I have a very strong first memory
People don't believe me when I tell them
I remember my father's Volkswagen it's
the car he had when we were in Pakistan
and when we left Pakistan from
Bangladesh he had to sell the car and I
remembered the last ride in the car
because I remember him speeding too much
I work on memory. Memory and the
disjuncture between what I remember and
how it must have been because I think
that can't be how I remember it
and my family history is always in all
my projects because it's the thing I
understand and it's the thing I can
enter in any way I want and I feel very
intimate with that history and I also
have this sense maybe it's a story I've
told myself that I'm reliving my parents
and my grandparents lives
I started making films I think to make
sense of all this
The word Fedayeen is
pronounced the same in Arabic and Hebrew
but only in one does it mean those who
sacrifice themselves
I am thinking about
that other photo again
One more enigma
inside the puzzle box standing still for
one pose and then just like that they vanish
I can be quite invisible and
unobtrusive one of my favorite things to
do is film in a political rally and
I'm just quietly in a corner filming
what I find interesting
You do lose that when you have a crew
I also want to keep making little things that
are experiments that are just for myself
to make films that kind of start
from accidents without planning you do
need to work quite small
My preferred way to be in a moderately
crowded room is to be just in the edge
listening to the stories I'm okay with
finding the one interesting strange just speaking on the side and even
quirky person just at the side of the room
The thing I do is write that person's story
I'm drawn to people on the margins
I'm more comfortable on the margins
I heard more refugees arrive today
More and more
Burmese claiming to be Bangladeshi
Turks claiming to be Polish
Everyone claiming to be me
There is something that comes to you from the
murkiness of the old material
I don't mean the fetish of how murky it is
because as we know you can actually take
contemporary digital material and
produce that look as well
But there's something about the murky blurry quality
of old film that makes you very aware of the time within which this material was made
This is the treasure trove back here
Because you're interested in
what they call geography
world politics, world history, it is mostly here
When I first see this
material usually off of a projector
the age of the material places me in the
time when this work was made so that to me
is very valuable and i'm interested in
somehow transmitting that
In a way if I really found the really really valuable
film reel it might be too much responsibility
You know I always think
there's such a film reel out there but
I'm relieved not to find it
I'm quite happy with the outtakes and
rejects and the not important film and
working with that
With the characters in my films almost all of whom are
real historical figures and blended in with fiction
There is a very specific thing that I'm drawn to
Not only marginal figures but
I'm drawn to this particular form of
masculinity I'm interested in looking at it
as a form of men trying to be men in
the ways they thought they were supposed
to and in trying to play out those roles
you know walking in to or sliding into
disaster and bringing others with them
It's a failed masculinity but also
tragic there's an option perhaps now for
a current generation to reinvent how
they think about gender period
My advice to anyone starting out in school or
since school is to always have a
notebook with you
It can be whatever size whether you want
it to fit in your pocket or be in your
bag and to write and draw things that
are good to you as they occur to you
and then leave that whole book alone for a
long time and don't go back and look at
those pages even preferably a few years later
when you have to struggle to
remember what it was about
I think that process of coming back to things you
wrote or did or thought in a few years
time is tremendously productive
It allows you to see a part of your own
subconscious that you won't see in the
moment but it will make sense in a few years time