How I came to film

I didn't study film, I studied computer science. Even as a kid, I was the one taking things apart to see how they work, first machines, then sketching from old books, and then code. I’ve never been great at learning from a strict curriculum, as most things I know came sideways. I find myself in the middle of projects, trying to figure out the tool while the work is already moving. Honestly, that’s how I process everything, even social dynamics, through systems and patterns. What pulled me toward film was watching it like most people in the field. After I finished school, I spent months consuming every movie I could get my hands on, and what stayed with me through that was cinematography, the idea that an image could carry a feeling words couldn't convey, and that a culture as underseen as ours could be made present somewhere outside of itself. Which is still the reason.

The 2011 revolution was my turn, as it gave me something I needed to document before I had a camera to do so. I started by editing other people's footage, sitting in front of a hard drive full of strangers' fragments and trying to piece together a country that was rearranging itself by the hour. That challenge is where I learned narrative. After things settled, I bought my first camera and went looking for the field where I spent the next few years inside local TV channels in Tripoli, exploring videography, broadcasting, media, and journalism, which are the working knowledge I still rely on to this day.

In 2016, when the campaign to push ISIS out of Sirte was underway, I went to film there. The fighters were mostly ordinary people who'd decided someone had to do it. I spent a long time at the front, walking through empty homes and abandoned neighborhoods. I still remember the clothes that were left scattered on the streets, and the way people who had stayed talked with this mix of fear and hope. The nights were always the most active, you hear rockets flying in the sky and fishing boats near the shores. That period shaped how I understand the work; if I don't show what's actually happening, the story may never get told, and the truth narrows.

I left television in 2017 to start my own media company, and even straightforward commercial briefs turned out to be small documentaries about the people who built the thing. I started looking for that layer in every project, and the further I went, the more one question wouldn't leave me alone; what stories about Libya were being told, and by whom?. After Gaddafi, the country was rebuilding a cinema culture that had been hollowed out for forty years. No cinema theatres, almost no film schools, no studios, and no working infrastructure for filmmakers who wanted to make serious work from inside it.

So, in 2021, a few of us wanted to start the initiative, and that is when Libya Film Institute was established. Most of what I've made since has lived in storytelling, pieces on internal displacement, migrants, women's lives, youth, and the futures they're trying to claim, climate, and artists who treat their craft as a tool for change. Returning to the Land, where a community displaced for over a decade rebuilds itself through hydroponics. Changing the Narrative, a migrant series that asks how the community sees the people living among it. On most of these, I worked across the production, cinematography, sound, edit, color, because that's how small documentaries get made and because each layer teaches you something about how the story should be heard.

What I want to make next are films that belong to no one but the people in them and stories with nowhere else to be heard. This site is a slow archive, built for the work ahead more than as a record of what came before. New pieces arrive at their own pace.