from an Interview in The Guardian, May 20, 2025
The first time I was in prison I was in solitary confinement. I was on my own in a tiny cell and they would take me out blindfolded to a place where I would sit in front of a wall and hear this voice at my back. It was the voice of the man who would question me – sometimes for two hours, sometimes for eight hours. And I would just hang on his voice all that time, fantasizing about who this person was from his voice. And I had an intuition that someday this voice would be an aspect of something I’d write or shoot and give a creative life to.
When you live in an ideological dictatorship – a closed system – you have no choice. Even when you walk on the street [the authorities] can ask you why you’re walking, where you’re going and why you are dressed in the way that you are. They create restrictions for every citizen, not just filmmakers. There is no escape. Your life is conditioned by the system. So you learn how to adjust in order to keep living, working, eating, speaking in spite of this system. I have had become a filmmaker in spite of restrictions.”
