My cinematic generation didn’t just come up with a topic or address an issue, but I can safely state that we managed to establish our own language. And this wasn’t a traditional language. […] With al-Leil I had an opportunity to lay the foundation for a structure that was entirely mine. I dedicated 20 years of my life to talking about this ancestral home of mine, Quneitra, with all its nightmares and dreams, with every vision that I developed into film, and carried from one film to another, with the purpose of composing a visual, sentimental and personal work. This is, as Tarkovsky calls it, a carving of history. This is a search for time from a personal perspective, not just a historical perspective. To me, the time of that vague love for the ancestral home, towards the mother and the lost father, and to the political era, which is also lost, or Quneitra in al-Leil – all of this is an attempt to express that pain, that loss, which pierces your connection to reality with the peculiar flavours of alienation and longing.
—MOHAMMAD MALAS in The Cinema of Muhammad Malas: Vision of a Syrian Auteur, edited by Samirah Alkassim, Nezar Andary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)
