"Some time at the age of twelve, I discovered a love for film, so sometime after that, at the age of fourteen, I was already determined. One day I came home from the cinema, from an American film that thrilled me, and I said I'd be a film director. Parents laughed, like all other relatives, they said "well, well, good, good", because I was fourteen, and they were, of course, convinced that I would change my mind over time. Because at fourteen years, boys do not know yet, there are so many choices from the garbage man to an astronaut. Thus, they were surprised I persevered."
"1968 was a fatal year for me, as was the letter from Prague sent by my cousin, who actually directed me to Prague instead of California, San Francisco. So 1968 was fatal again because it erased my promising career for twenty years, which I then spent at the embassy, where I wrote some screenplays, but my career was gone. So only after 20 years, without any ties, contacts in the film industry, on the television I had to... Thanks to the fact I wrote screenplays, that I know... I have the cinematic vision and I can write the screenplays in a way that can be shot in an interesting manner. So I managed to return to the industry, but the main period, in which my potential was huge, those twenty years... after FAMU, when I had the biggest energy and most ideas, that was all gone. Thus, 1968 was a milestone for me."
"The eighty-ninth year was very significant again, I spent it in the squares, at the Ypsilon Theater, where my wife got over acquaintances, people like Václav Klaus, who spoke there, and there, you could say, began his politics, his political career. Because there, he showed himself like a rhetor who can really speak beautifully, just all those-Komárek, Zeman, Klaus actually built the current position back then.So
I experienced all of them in Ypsilon, on the squares, Havel, I was on the huge demonstration with 500,000 people at Letna. So I experienced it really honestly and euphorically. Me and my wife. "
"My childhood until the eight years when I was still in the city where I was born, that is, in Aleppo, is unfortunately so far away from me that I recall only fragments of it, I have only very dull memories. But the rest, from the eight years on, I spent in inland Syria among the Bedouin, and if I had to describe it - my childhood, I was really happy, I was happy because I went to school and I enjoyed that school, I did it by hand, I painted, I made houses out of such thick paper, I had a lot of interests. And I had a brother less than two years older, then a sister two years younger, so we existed and lived there quite harmoniously. Our parents weren't very rich, but we didn't experience any scarcity, so I had a very happy childhood."
He was born on March 16, 1945, in Aleppo, Syria. At the beginning of 1963, he flew to Czechoslovakia to study at FAMU. First, however, he had to take a Czech course for foreigners. The witness officially graduated from FAMU in 1968. Normalization brought for him an end to his film hopes. The witness tried to remain in Czechoslovakia, he even started a family there. In 1976, however, he was threatened with deportation, when he accepted the job of translator and interpreter at the Syrian embassy in Prague so that he could stay with his family. He returned to film just before the Velvet Revolution in 1989. He was then able to become known to viewers in 2005 through the family series TV Nova “Ordinace v růžové zahradě.”
