Edition 2015

The Mulberry House

Sara was born in Yemen 30 years ago, the daughter of a Yemenite father and a Scottish mother. During her teenage years she started feeling increasingly uncomfortable in her environment and at 17 she decided to move to Scotland to live with her mother. Her father only approved of her leaving if she didn’t give up her Yemenite roots. Sarah made that commitment but didn’t stick to her promise. Ten years later, in 2011, Sara returns to Yemen as a new person. She’s determined to face her past and has the will to rediscover her native roots. Unexpectedly, she finds that both her family and her country are about to undergo a revolution.

Theme:

Sara Ishaq

Sara has worked extensively as a director, researcher, local producer for international TV outlets such as the BBC, Channel 4 and AJ since she graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2007.

While pursuing an MFA in Film Directing at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2011, Sara returned home to Yemen to document the country’s ‘Arab Spring’ as a BBC camerawoman. On the side, she filmed her award-winning independent debut film Karama Has No Walls (2012), which was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award and an Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject). In 2013, her award-winning personal feature doc The Mulberry House, premiered at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), and was later released theatrically in Austria and aired on Al-Jazeera English.

In 2017, Sara co-founded Comra Films, a Yemen-based film foundation for creative film productions and training. Over the years, she has sat on a number of film jury committees such as BFI London Film Awards, BBC Aan Korb Film Festival, IDFA Bertha Fund, MOOOV Film Festival and others.

She is now developing her first Fiction Feature, ‘The Station’, which was selected for L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation Festival de Cannes 2020.

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Credits

Direcció
Sara Ishaq

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Awards