Deeyah Khan conquers hate with a camera

INTERVIEW: Modern Times Review speaks with Deeyah Khan on choosing subjects, gaining access, and sitting down with those dedicated to making the world a more hateful place. BAFTA-nominated, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentarian Deeyah Khan, who was also the inaugural UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Artistic Freedom and Creativity, can now add the 2020 Fritt Ord Foundation Prize to her mantle. The Norwegian-Pakistani filmmaker was recently honored «for her intrepid, methodical and innovative documentary films on extremism.» Indeed. Beginning with 2012’s Banaz: A Love Story, which detailed the life and untimely death of a British-Kurdish woman murdered by her own family in a senseless «honor» killing, and on through 2015’s Jihad: A Story of the Others and 2017’s White Right: Meeting The Enemy – which involved Khan embedding with those on diverse sides of the extremist divide – the UK-based activist-artist has proved to be an uncompromising talent with one heck of a fearless gaze. And most recently, Khan has trained that gaze across the pond with not one but two films out this year, America’s War on Abortion and Muslim in Trump’s America. How she’s found time to tackle these explosive topics while also running Fuuse, the media and arts company she founded in order to put «women, people from minorities, and third-culture kids» in control of their own narratives, is a question that’s lately been front and center in the Modern Times Review mind, which is why we’re grateful Khan took a breather from her busy schedule to fill us in on choosing subjects, gaining access, and sitting down with those dedicated to making the world a more hateful place.

To read my intrepid interview visit Modern Times Review.