Blood Runner began with a feeling of helplessness - of watching unimaginable suffering unfold from a distance, while everyday life around you somehow continues.

Through Leila, I wanted to explore the strange guilt that can come with being safe when the people you love, and the place you come from, are not. Her journey through London becomes increasingly tangled with memory, grief and inherited trauma, until the distance between what is happening around her and what she carries inside begins to disappear.

The film moves between reality and a fractured sense of time because trauma rarely exists neatly in the past. It follows us. It repeats itself. Sometimes it makes the present feel indistinguishable from a memory.

At its heart, Blood Runner is not about explaining Palestine. It is about asking an audience to experience, however briefly, the emotional weight carried by a young Palestinian woman in the diaspora - her grief, her guilt, her love, and her desperate need to do something when doing anything can feel impossibly small.

For Leila, running becomes more than a job. It becomes an attempt to outrun helplessness.