Ian Iqbal Rashid | |
|---|---|
 Ian Iqbal Rashid in London in October 2021 | |
| Born | 1968 (age 55–56) |
| Occupations | |
Ian Iqbal Rashid (born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a poet, screenwriter and filmmaker known in particular for his volumes of poetry, for the TV series Sort Of and This Life and the feature films Touch of Pink and How She Move .
Of Indian ancestry and raised in the Ismaili Muslim faith, Rashid's family lived in colonial East Africa for generations. Different years of birth are given for Rashid in different sources, but academic work gives the year as 1968. [1] [2] : 201 In the early 1970s, his family was forced to leave Tanzania. After failing to secure asylum in the UK and US, they settled in Toronto. [1]
Rashid began his career as an arts journalist, critic, curator, and events programmer, particularly focussed on South Asian diasporic, Muslim and LGBTQ cultural work.
In the early 1990s, Rashid returned to London, Britain, where he met his partner, the writer, curator, and academic Peter Ride. He then won a bursary to attend a prestigious BBC writing internship programme Black Screen and soon after started working in film and television as a screenwriter, director and producer. He currently divides his time between Canada and the UK.
Rashid is best known for the iconic BAFTA-winning BBC show, This Life [3] [4] for which he won a Writer's Guild of Great Britain award, [5] and for writing and co-exec producing across three seasons of the critical hit and Peabody Awards [6] winning series Sort Of , which has appeared on many end-of-year best lists after it dropped on CBC and HBO Max in late 2021. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] For Sort Of , he has been nominated for best comedy series writer at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards and the 2022 Writers Guild of Canada award for the episode "Sort Of Mary Poppins". [12]
Rashid began working as a writer in UK television in the late 1990s, trained on the BBC's Black Screen internship. His early credits include Dilly Downtown , and the soap London Bridge (Carlton Television for ITV) along with the BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winner, This Life . [5]
For BBC's Woman's Hour Programme, Rashid wrote and directed Leaving Normal, a comedy serial about same-sex adoption starring Imelda Staunton and Meera Syal. [13]
Since then, Rashid has written for broadcasters and companies such as Showtime, Lionsgate, Amazon Prime Video, ITV (TV network) and Sphere Media. Most recently, he served as co-executive producer and writer on the third season of Sort Of , for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and HBO Max. The Canadian series won many awards nationally and internationally including at the 2022 Peabody Awards. He is currently developing Nobel Prize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Afterlives into a series for Razor Film and Warp Films. He also has projects in development with Crave and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
In 2022, Ian was awarded a fellowship on the CBC-BIPOC TV & Film Showrunner Catalyst in partnership with the Canadian Film Centre as an emerging television/streaming showrunner. [14]
Self-taught as a filmmaker, in 1991, Rashid made the short film Bolo Bolo! with Kaspar Saxena. [15] The film, part of an HIV/AIDS cable access series called Toronto Living With AIDS, resulted in the series being pulled from Rogers Television after complaints about sexually suggestive content, though it had a long and healthy life at film festivals. [16]
Rashid went on to write two award-winning short films, Surviving Sabu (1999, Arts Council of England) [17] and Stag (2001, BBC Films).
Touch of Pink , Rashid's first feature film, spent 12 years in development. [18] In 2003, he finally had the chance to direct the project as a Canada-UK co-production. It premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim, [19] a bidding war, and eventually, a sale to Sony Picture Classics. The film has attracted extensive scholarly commentary. [20] [1] [2] in 2024, Sanghum Film Collective hosted a 20th-anniversary screening and celebration of the film at the legendary Paradise Theatre in Toronto. [21]
How She Move received a similarly positive reception at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Rashid in 2007, the film is set in the world of step dancing. It was nominated for a Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and purchased by Paramount Vantage. The film opened to positive reviews [22] [23] [24] and strong box office.
Rashid published his first poetry collection, Black Markets, White Boyfriends and Other Acts of Elision, in 1991. [25] Two more followed: the chapbook Song of Sabu in 1993 [26] and The Heat Yesterday in 1995. [27] Rashid has recently started publishing poetry again, [28] and a fourth collection is rumoured.
His poems have appeared in journals and been anthologized widely including the poems "Another Country", "Could Have Danced All Night", "Hot Property" and "Early Dinner, Weekend Away" in John Barton and Billeh Nickerson's 2007 anthology Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets,. [29] More early work is included in the 2009 anthology Forbidden Sex, Forbidden Texts: New India's Gay Poets. [30]
He is referenced in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature [31] and Making a Difference:Canadian Multicultural Literature. [32]
He wrote and read his short story "Muscular Bridges" for BBC Radio 4's 50th HMT Windrush Anniversary, which later evolved into the feature film Touch of Pink
Rashid has also written song lyrics, most notably for his film Touch of Pink .
In the late 1980s, Rashid was a regular contributor to the Canadian LGBT magazine Rites , and the cultural journals Fuse and TSAR Publications . In 1995, he was the Guest Editor for Rungh magazine's Queer Special Issue. [33] His curatorial catalogue essay for "Beyond Destinations", [34] a show he curated for Ikon Gallery in 1993, was reprinted in Rungh in December 2019. [35] He was also assistant editor of Bazaar Magazine , a quarterly journal covering South Asian arts in the UK in the early 1990s. Ian's personal essays have also been published in Wasafiri , Third Text and The Globe and Mail .
Rashid has also curated film programmes and exhibitions for venues such as the National Film Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Experimenta. He was the founder and first director of Desh Pardesh, Canada's first arts festival focusing on diasporic South Asian arts and culture.
Amongst many awards and festival prizes, Rashid has received the Writer's Guild of Great Britain [5] Award for Television Series Writing and the Aga Khan Award for Excellence in the Arts.[ citation needed ] He was selected as one of 2010's Breakthrough Brits on the prestigious UK Film Council (BFI) programme alongside Riz Ahmed, Yann Demange, Daniel Kaluuya and others. [36] His film and TV career began when he won a place on the prestigious BBC internship scheme Black Screen, alongside writers such as playwright Tanika Gupta.
In 2022, Ian was awarded a fellowship on the CBC-BIPOC TV & Film Showrunner Catalyst in partnership with the Canadian Film Centre as an emerging television/streaming Show Runner. [14]
His poetry has been nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. [37]
His work as a writer and executive producer on the show Sort Of earned him a Peabody Award in 2021 and a nomination for 2022. [38]
Steven William Moffat is a Scottish television writer, television producer and screenwriter. He is best known for his work as the second showrunner and head writer of the 2005 revival of the BBC sci-fi television series Doctor Who (2010–17), and for co-creating and co-writing the BBC crime drama television series Sherlock (2010–17). In the 2015 Birthday Honours, Moffat was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to drama.
A showrunner is the top-level executive producer of a television series. The position outranks other creative and management personnel, including episode directors, in contrast to feature films, in which the director has creative control over the production, and the executive producer's role is limited to investing. In scripted comedy and drama TV shows, the showrunner also usually serves as the head writer. The role of a showrunner is not present on all television series, especially outside the US; this article describes the nature of the role where it is present.
Mark Gatiss is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, director, producer and novelist. He is best known for his work in television acting in and co-creating shows with Steven Moffat. Gatiss has received several awards including a BAFTA TV Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and two Laurence Olivier Awards.
Pauline Jane Tranter is an English television executive who was the executive vice-president of programming and production at BBC Worldwide's Los Angeles base from 2009 until 2015. From 2006 to 2008, she was the BBC's controller of fiction; in this capacity she oversaw the corporation's output in drama and comedy, as well as films and programmes acquired from overseas, across all BBC TV channels. Critics were concerned that the BBC had invested too much creative power in one person, and following Tranter's move to the United States, the position of controller of fiction was abolished and the responsibilities divided up among four other executives.
Derek Kevin Harvie is a Canadian TV and film writer and producer.
Waris Hussein is a British-Indian television and film director. At the beginning of his career he was employed by the BBC as its youngest drama director. He directed early episodes of Doctor Who, including the first serial, An Unearthly Child (1963), and later directed the multiple-award-winning Thames Television serial Edward & Mrs. Simpson (1978).
René Balcer is a Canadian-American television writer, director, producer, and showrunner, as well as a photographer and documentary film-maker.
John Fawcett is a Canadian director, writer, and producer of film and television. Alongside Graeme Manson, he co-created and is a director for the award-winning Temple Street Productions television series Orphan Black.
Peter Gould is an American television writer, director and producer. He worked on all five seasons of the AMC drama Breaking Bad, and was nominated for four Writers Guild of America (WGA) Awards for his work on the series. After Breaking Bad ended, he went on to become the co-creator and co-showrunner, with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, of the show's spinoff, Better Call Saul. He became the series' sole showrunner after Gilligan left the writers room.
Graeme Manson is a Canadian screenwriter and producer from Vancouver, British Columbia. He is known for his work on the Space and BBC America science fiction thriller television series Orphan Black.
Jason Horwitch is an American film and television writer. He is the recipient of the Writers Guild of America’s Paul Selvin Award for FX’s The Pentagon Papers. Horwitch created AMC’s conspiracy thriller television series Rubicon and was a writer/producer on the TV series Southland. He also served as Co-EP on Season 6 of Netflix's House of Cards and EP / showrunner on Season 3 of Epix's Berlin Station. Horwitch got his start on the TV series Medical Investigation, wrote the made-for-television film Joe and Max, and co-wrote the independent feature Finding Graceland.
Paul W. Downs is an American actor, writer, director, and producer. He is the co-creator, co-showrunner and one of the stars of the critically acclaimed HBO Max series Hacks, for which he has received a Golden Globe, Peabody Award, and three Primetime Emmy Awards, among others. Downs first gained attention for his role in the Comedy Central series Broad City, which ran for five seasons and for which he was also a writer, director and executive producer.
Shannon Masters is a Canadian screenwriter. She is best known for the film Empire of Dirt, for which she won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 2nd Canadian Screen Awards in 2014.
Killing Eve is a British spy thriller television series produced in the United Kingdom by Sid Gentle Films for BBC America and BBC Three. The series follows Eve Polastri, a British intelligence investigator tasked with capturing psychopathic assassin Villanelle. As the chase progresses, the two develop a mutual obsession. Based on the Villanelle novel series by Luke Jennings, each of the show's series is led by a different female head writer. The first series had Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the head writer, the second series Emerald Fennell, the third series Suzanne Heathcote, and the fourth series Laura Neal.
Sort Of is a Canadian television sitcom, released on CBC Television beginning in 2021. Created by Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo, the series stars Baig as Sabi Mehboob, a non-binary millennial trying to balance their roles as a child of Pakistani immigrant parents, a bartender at an LGBTQ bookstore and café, and a caregiver to the young children of a professional couple.
Bilal Baig is a Canadian writer and actor. They are best known for their play Acha Bacha and CBC series Sort Of (2021–2023).
The Parker Andersons and Amelia Parker are a pair of related Canadian television sitcoms, which premiered in 2021 on Super Channel. The shows both depict a blended family living in the suburbs of Chicago following the remarriage of widower Tony Parker and divorced single mother Cleo Anderson ; while they share interconnections of character and storyline, The Parker Andersons centres on the whole family, while Amelia Parker focuses more specifically on the particular experiences of Tony's teenage daughter Amelia, who is still coping with the death of her mother and struggling with the anxiety disorder of selective mutism.
Soo Hugh is an American television writer, producer, and showrunner. She served as co-showrunner for the first season of AMC's The Terror and is currently showrunner for Apple TV+'s Pachinko, an adaptation of Min Jin Lee's bestselling novel.
Jennica Harper is a Canadian television writer and producer, most noted as a WGC Screenwriting Award winner and two-time Canadian Screen Award nominee for her work on the television sitcom Jann.
JP Larocque is a Canadian screenwriter, producer, and journalist. They are best known for their work on the television series Sort Of, for which they were nominated for Best Writing in a Comedy Series at the 11th Canadian Screen Awards in 2023. In 2024, they were nominated for a Canadian Screen Award as a co-executive producer of the Family Channel series Home Sweet Rome.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
