Tala Hadid

Tala Hadid (born in London, England) trained as a painter.

Hadid was born to a Moroccan mother and an Iraqi father. Her paternal grandfather, a Marxist economist, was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein. Her aunt is the late architect Zaha Hadid.

Hadid co-produced and directed her first full-length film while she was studying as an undergraduate at Brown University. The film, Sacred Poet, focuses the lens on the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini with rare interviews with Laura Betti, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Citti and Ninetto Davoli.

The author of several short films, in 2000 while she was working on a project on the Macedonian Roma community in Naples, Italy, she was awarded a fellowship to study film at the graduate film department at Columbia University in New York.

In 2001, she directed Windsleepers, a film set in St Petersburg, Russia, with poets Genya Turovskaya and Vladimir Kucheriavkin.

In 2005, Hadid completed her thesis film, Tes Cheveux Noirs Ihsan. The film, shot in Northern Morocco and in the Rif Mountains, was awarded the 2005 Cinecolor/Kodak Prize and in June 2005 received a Student Academy Award. It has screened at numerous Film Festivals including the New York Film Festival at the Lincoln Center, the Sundance Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival (where it was nominated for a Tiger Award), the Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, the Kiev International Film Festival, the Sydney Film Festival, the International Film Festival Oberhausen and L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. The film went on to win numerous awards including the Global Lens Prize, A BAFTA special mention and a Special Jury Prize and best Actress Award at the Tangiers International Film Festival. In February 2006 the film won the Panorama Best short Film Award at the Berlin Film Festival.

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