ABOUT

Hanan is an award-winning British-Egyptian freelance documentary filmmaker based between London and Cairo. She moved to Egypt at the outbreak of the revolution and directed her first feature-length documentary “In the Shadow of a Man”, an intimate portrait of women and resistance in Egypt. Filmed on a shoe-string budget, it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and screened at several festivals world-wide, including at the British Film Institute, winning the Best Documentary Filmmaker Award at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. She was also part of the revolutionary media collective Mosireen working with fellow filmmakers to document the uprising from ground level, filming and editing short documentaries that generated millions of views.

Alongside her own projects, Hanan is currently Head of Video Production at the Palestine Festival of Literature, an annual festival that takes place in cities across Palestine, and has worked as a producer for Greenpeace, filming on one of their investigatory ship tours in the Indian Ocean. She has recently finished directing and producing “The Odyssey: A National Story” a short documentary for the National Theatre, which gives unique insight into their landmark production, the largest community theatre project of its kind, following hundreds of members of the public as they prepare to be on stage for the first time in their lives.

Born into the third generation of a family of Egyptian political dissidents, Hanan grew up in London and her work is rooted in the relationship between art and activism.