Destiny doesn't control your life, but it does place you on a path. It's how you walk down that path that determines stories I tell.

I'm both an artist / filmmaker and a human rights defender.

Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.

Celebrate your victories and mark your defeats. Ultimately documentary filmmaking is not a job, it's a calling.

I'm a storyteller who uses all of the beauty and power of cinema to tell tales of human struggles for positive social change.

Everyone has access to a pen and paper, but to be a great writer is difficult.

The digital revolution has had a democratizing effect. Now anyone can be a filmmaker, but to be a good filmmaker is as hard as it ever was.

I'm an eclectic and avid filmgoer. I try to see everything from romantic comedies to blockbusters to art house films, world cinema and documentaries.

When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out.

If you make a great film full of emotion, of pathos, people want to continue to know more, to work harder.

Like a human rights lawyer who uses the law to rectify wrongs, I use filmic storytelling for the same effect.

Even when I interviewed bands, it was about asking them about writing songs, so it was more for me than anybody else.

Dishonest people conceal their faults from themselves as well as others, honest people know and confess them.

Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.

To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.

The first step... shall be to lose the way.

If you correct your hidden deeds subsequently, Allaah will correct your outward deeds.

The end of all motion is its beginning; for it terminates at no other end save its own beginning from which begins to be moved and to which it tends ever to return, in order to cease and rest in it.

You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

Never does any pride enter the heart of a man ex­cept that his in­tel­li­gence de­creases by the same amount.