See How Life Has Changed in the Middle East Over 58 Years | Short Film Showcase

That's right across the Lebanese Syrian border. I stopped, pulled out my camera because I had resolved that the entire time I was in the Middle East, that I was going to keep a detailed photographic record of all my landscapes and have a real collection of geographic photographs. As it turned out, I took about 20,000. When I saw the description of this photo, it just had a church on the outskirts of our deal, and when I saw the photo, I couldn't believe it.

I'm an Iraqi-American, but my parents are both Iraqi born and bred and instilled the ideals and the idea of this country in our head: this Garden of Eden. I was very aware of this monastery my entire life that it existed and that one day I was gonna go visit it. My great-grandparents kept having daughters and they wanted a son, so they went to this monastery named after St. Behnam. They prayed to St. Behnam and said, "Please give us a boy, please give us a boy." My grandfather, Madan, was born, and they dressed him up like a girl when they took him back because the evil spirits that were guaranteeing that my great-grandma didn't have a son would be tricked.

Sadly, in March 2015, ISIS blew it up, and my whole family was distraught. It was as if my grandfather had died again. These photos give a lot of insight into these artifacts because so many of them are destroyed and were destroyed by ISIS recently. For Americans, I think it's really useful to look at these photos and see, like, this is the beginning of civilization: one of the most ancient lands of all time. I mean, we all care about history and culture, which is weird. Like, you don't listen to Drake; you're, you know, going to Cheesesteak joint in Philly and be like, "This is civilization." But it is.

You know, Syria is known as the cradle of civilizations, and walking down the streets of Sphere, you see a diverse mix of people. You know, you can literally see the history through the ages. Senior analysts and activists, Boehner is in Damascus. The last time I visited the city was 2011, and then I was detained, and I had to leave, and I was never able to stand visit the city again. I'm a Syrian American; I was born and raised in Florida, but I am originally from Damascus.

In 2011, we were full of hope. After a few weeks from the uprising or the revolution, it evolved, and they invented something called, how would you translate that, the flying protest? Something like that, which is like three or four minutes. They agreed to go to that point and to pretend that, for example, they are just walking or eating. It starts, and everybody's chanting, and they are filming, and then like two or three minutes, and they say, "That's it."

We didn't think about this industrial torture and killing from the government, and we didn't expect that we would have one day something called ISIS. For example, those pictures are very important to show so people, when they look at them, they don't only see buildings and stones, but also they realize that there are stories associated with those places. Many places in Turkey always had a shortage of water. We had an agreement among ourselves that when the water came on, we would all go to the window in the courtyard and call out "sous-sous," so that everybody could run and fill the bathtub. This is one of the strong memories in one of our family stories.

We sometimes forget, like, teeth were very different, like years ago. When I look to these photos, I remember, ah, like some parts of Istanbul I had not been always like a shopping mall. Of course, I have lived my life in Istanbul. Two years ago, I came to the United States to do my Master's. You should see this place now; there are like all these very chic breakfast places, cafes, restaurants. It creates like some sort of class-based segregation in the city for sure. There is something lost there.

Grand Bazaar is like this old Ottoman Bazaar in Istanbul. When you go there, it's like you went a few centuries back. It's a place that carried that thing from the past, but also like trust from itself. I mean, I don't really like Istanbul being little presenters; like I like a bridge between East and West. It's like you can like show a veiled woman as like the east of Turkey and like a woman with like a miniskirt as like the west. But it doesn't work like that. You can't, like, everybody's categories. You lose what actually is happening.

America likes to focus on the juicy headlines of violence and radical groups. I've been asked if from oil girls in my backyards I ride camels to school. I'm being completely and genuinely serious. The Gulf countries have a lot to offer in terms of how they prospered from nomadic communities and pearl divers. Accommodations were not then what they are now. Kuwait had one more or less decent hotel, but the walls of my room were made out of cardboard. I have to laugh at the super, super luxury hotels that are there now.

I'm a Kuwaiti of Palestinian origin. I was born and raised Kuwaiti from a large Qatari family. In terms of this picture, if you were to look at what it looks like today, you'd see a lot more skyscrapers. Every other street you can see huge skyscrapers, and then a few corners away, you have old traditional houses. You have this stoop running through the middle of the city.

What's really amazing is the youth actually built an extra side to the souk and they've called it somos. There are bone-like burger joints and pop-up stores. These are showing me images that for some reason, maybe due to technology, weren't available for Kuwaitis to create themselves. So, you know, we don't necessarily have access to these. We spend more time learning about World War II in Europe than we do of our own history. So for me, this is amazing to see how far we've gone.

Kuwait has progressed so much. Even if we revert to the way things were configured, we're not going to claim our claim to modernity. Lebanon is an example of a country that had difficult times but has managed to have a society that is inclusive and very open and free, and that's rather unique in the world, let alone unique in the Middle East. I am Lebanese and American, and I grew up in a Lebanon that was very open to the world, very vibrant. It was called the Paris of the Middle East, but it had a number of political problems, and it descended into a long civil war.

To see the collapse of a state and the basic order that you grew up in and took for granted being replaced by people with guns in every neighborhood setting up their own checkpoints, seeing friends of mine getting polarized, picking up guns and maybe shooting at somebody who might have been a neighbor, and that's scary. Since then, we've had 26 years of rebuilding in an inclusive democratic society.

The massive demonstrations, what's known as the Cedar Revolution, happened around this statue in 2005. Maybe more than a million, million and a half people in a country of 4 million. These moments when you know citizens by their hundreds of thousands who are all agreeing on one unifying passion: they really want something different than the reality that they're in. But those beautiful wishes are rarely realized. Even if you take pictures of Europe seven years ago, you'd see devastation, civil war, the Nazis, genocide. You know, but time moves on.

Yes, the Middle East is going through a very difficult, dangerous, traumatic period, but history is about change. It is about, you know, phases and things developing. It hasn't been always this way, and it's not always going to be this way.