Farida Zahran is an Egyptian writer/director and a thesis student pursuing her MFA in Film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her short film, Youth, premiered at SXSW 2019 and received an Oscar-qualifying award at Palm Springs International ShortFest. She is a member of the 2019 New York Film Festival Artists Academy. Prior to grad school, Farida worked in development at the Doha Film Institute. She is currently based in Brooklyn, NY and is working on her first feature screenplay as well as a Cairo-set musical short. 

The production of Youth came together unusually. In a very rushed process, Zahran started writing only a month before shooting and the script changed quite extensively—not only through the rehearsal process, but also during the post-production process, with Zahran writing full scenes in post.

Youth premiered at SXSW back in March before hitting the festival circuit with a notable stop at the Palm Springs ShorfFest in June where it won an Oscar-qualifying award as “Best Live-action under 15 minutes”.

In the meantime Zahran is currently working on two new exciting projects, a Cairo-set dark comedy musical short and her first feature screenplay.

The following two tabs change content below.