Glasgow-born writer and director Raisah Ahmed believes being South Asian and Scottish is an advantage. “In Glasgow, everyone is as Scottish as anyone else, it’s an international label,” says Ahmed, who has several film and television projects lined up, some of which she hopes to direct.
History of the First World War Half Moon Campwith producer Zorana Piggott and Film4, is written in five languages - German, English, Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic – and tells the story of a soldier who ends up in a prison camp run by the Germans and the Ottoman Empire, where the authorities try to persuade Muslim prisoners of war to fight against the Allies. “We’re pitching it to directors,” says Ahmed, who speaks English, Urdu and Punjabi and can read Arabic but not German; fortunately, there is very little German in her script.
Ahmed also adapts Mahsuda Snaith’s book The things we thought we knew with the writer, who was brought to the project by producer Shirine Best. Ahmed is attached as director on a magical realist story about a woman with chronic illness, which spans two timelines, and is supported by the BFI’s First Feature programme. She recently took part in a Screen Scotland Script Circle workshop with a horror script. St KildaSet on the Scottish island, the story revolves around a woman working for the National Trust conservation organization who is preparing to leave the archipelago when some Americans are shipwrecked and lay claim to the archipelago. She is now forced to protect the land and herself.
After completing her Masters in Literature, Culture and Local Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Ahmed joined the Second Light film training programme in 2010, which was set up to address the lack of diversity in the industry and to work with young people. She wrote her first short film after being commissioned by Second Light and her TV credits include directing CBBC’s SparkBBC3’s The break and author of the BBC digital channel’s relationship drama The Social controlwhich is told over a telephone. She was in the writers’ room for two seasons of Channel 4’s We are Lady Parts and adapts Martin Sixsmith’s book Ayesha’s Gift for television with Freedom Scripted.
If you have to choose between TV and cinema, the big screen wins. “I grew up watching films and could identify with them, even though most of the characters are nothing like me,” she says. “That’s exactly what I want to convey to people through my films.” As a Muslim filmmaker, she has never felt that her faith limited her filmmaking ambitions. “The diverse range of projects I work on in film and television is proof of that.”
Contact: Jessica Cooper, Curtis Brown
