Ashtar Al Khirsan
Writer/Director
About Ashtar Al Khirsan

I began my career making a series of one-off documentaries for the BBC which led to me making single films for the Arena arts strand on BBC2. My documentaries received strong critical praise in the national press and have been screened at various international film festivals.
My feature film script, Bird in a Storm, was developed with support from the EU Media Programme and
was selected for the Sources 2 Script Development Workshop in Berlin.
My short fiction film, Abdullah and Leilah was funded by the Wellcome Trust and premiered at the
El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt in 2018. My most recent short fiction film, Shawafa, was made under the DirectorsUK/ARRI Alexa short film scheme (2019).
I am a graduate of the National Film and Television School where I studied Fiction Direction.