19th May 2012
Saeed Taji Farouky is an award-winning documentary director whose work focuses on issues of human rights and social justice, often in the Middle East and North Africa. His films take a creative approach to combining observational and investigative styles and his work stresses transparency, often referencing the relationship between filmmaker and subject. His approach to filmmaking won him a TED 2010 fellowship.
Born in the UK to Palestinian/Egyptian parents, he grew up in London and Bahrain, and studied documentary photography at Boston's School for the Museum of Fine Arts. He began working as a documentary photographer and print journalist in 2004, the same year he directed his first documentary I See The Stars At Noon, in which he followed a Moroccan man as he attempted to cross into Spain illegally.
In 2009, Farouky was named Artist-in-Residence at Tate Britain, after twice being named Artist-in-Residence at the British Museum. His 2007 documentary Tunnel Trade - about the underground smuggling economy through Gaza's tunnels - recently won Outstanding Short Documentary at the San Francisco Arab Film Festival. His work has been broadcast internationally on channels including Channel 4, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al-Jazeera English and his films have been officially selected for The Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, Oslo International Film Festival, London International Documentary Film Festival and the Watch Docs, amongst others.