Yasmin Fedda | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh University of Manchester, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology |
| Occupation(s) | Filmmaker and academic |
| Employer | Queen Mary University of London |
| Notable work | Breadmakers (2007) Queens of Syria (2014 Ayouni (2020) |
| Website | yasminfedda |
Yasmin Fedda is a Palestinian filmmaker, artist, creative producer, and academic, based in the United Kingdom. She is most noted as a documentary film director, producer and programmer, and has taught with film organisations, NGOs and universities internationally. She was a co-founder of the project Highlight Arts, UK, which works with artists in times of conflict. [1]
Her films have won awards and been screened at international festivals including the Sundance Film Festival and the Edinburgh Film Festival, as well as being broadcast by the BBC and Al Jazeera English. [2] [3] Fedda is a senior lecturer in film at Queen Mary University of London. [4] [5]
Yasmin Fedda holds an M.A. in social anthropology from the University of Edinburgh, an M.A. in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, and a Ph.D. by practice in Transdisciplinary Documentary film from the University of Edinburgh. [6]
Having spent a year as a support worker at the Garvald Edinburgh bakery, she made the short documentary film Breadmakers (2007), which had an acclaimed reception, [7] [8] being named as best short documentary at the Middle East International Film Festival [9] [10] and was nominated for a BAFTA for best short Scottish documentary of 2007. [11] Her 2014 film Queens of Syria also won the Black Pearl award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. [1] [12] [13] It is a documentary that follows a theatre project run with Syrian refugee women in Amman, where they are in the final rehearsals of staging a new version of Euripides's tragedy, The Trojan Women , interwoven with their own experiences of war. [14] [15] [16] [17]
Fedda's 2020 film Ayouni premiered at CPH:DOX in 2020. [18] [19] Described by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian as "a powerful and urgent documentary tribute", Ayouni focuses on Bassel Safadi and Paolo Dall'Oglio, both "forcibly disappeared" in Syria, Bassel's wife Noura Ghazi Safadi, and Machi, Paolo's sister. [4] In 2024, Fedda's interactive installation The Pathogen of War premiered at CPH:DOX, [20] [21] and also that year she made the feature-length film How We Work, with 39 filmmakers across the world. [22] [23]
Fedda has been a participant in a variety of conferences and her work has been widely shown at festivals, on television and in galleries around the world, including at the Sundance Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, the Glasgow Film Festival, the Carthage Film Festival, the Dublin Film Festival, and the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. [24] [25] [26] [27]
She is a co-founder of the Highlight Arts project, "which brings together a diverse array of artists, writers, photographers and others to explore the stories of and to give voice to those affected by war, environmental disaster and other forms of conflict", [28] making use of residencies, workshops and labs, translations and collaborations. [29]