Palestinian director wins British Academy Film Award

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi is now a winner of the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) after her short film “The Present” won the award for Best British Short Film on Saturday.
Absolutely blown away!!! A BAFTA!!! 😹🎥🙌🙏🏾 https://t.co/NJL4NnWD4i
— Farah Nabulsi (@farah_nabulsi) April 10, 2021
The film, which is Nablusi’s first effort as a director, is about a Palestinian girl and a father who both go to buy the girls’ mother a present, a typically simple task proven difficult due to the checkpoints the girl and her father have to go through.
The film won the Best Short Film award at the Jim Sheridan Short Film Competition, which was held for the first time as part of the seventh Dublin Arabic Film Festival in January. The film is written and directed by Nabulsi and is co-written by Hind Shoufani.
“On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?” reads the synopsis on IMDb.
The film stars Saleh Bakri, Mariam Kanj, and Mariam Basha.
Speaking to MEMO last year, Nabulsi said the short film was based on her own experiences and that of other Palestinians with restricted freedom of movement in the West Bank. She just could not understand the checkpoints.
Farah Nabulsi is a Palestinian British Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker and human rights advocate.
She began her career as an institutional equity stockbroker. She ended up with a CFA designation at JP Morgan Chase before moving on to build a children-focused business that she ran for 10 years.
In 2015, Nabulsi started working in the film industry.
She founded a production company through which she writes, produces and directs fiction films, exploring topics that matter to her and she created digital resources to deconstruct the Israeli military occupation of Palestine in a way never done before.