Yasmin Ahmad
| Yasmin binti Ahmad | |
|---|---|
Yasmin Ahmad in 2006, three years before her death.
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| Born |
7 January 1958 Kampung Bukit Treh, Muar, Johor, Federation of Malaya (now Malaysia) |
| Died | 25 July 2009 (aged 51) Damansara Specialist Hospital, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia |
| Occupation | Film director, film writer, scriptwriter |
| Spouse(s) | Tan Yew Leong (2003–2009, her death) |
| Parent(s) | Ahmad Hashim (father) Inom Yon (mother) |
Yasmin Ahmad (7 January 1958 – 25 July 2009) was a film director, writer and scriptwriter from Malaysia and was also the executive creative director at Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur. Her television commercials and films are well known in Malaysia for their humour, heart and love that crosses cross-cultural barriers, in particular her ads for Petronas, the national oil and gas company. Her works have won multiple awards both within Malaysia and internationally. However, in Malaysia itself, her films are highly controversial since they depict events and relationships seen as forbidden by social conservatives, especially hard-line interpretations of Islam.
Yasmin was born in Kampung Bukit Treh in Muar, Johor on 7 January 1958. A graduate in arts majoring in politics and psychology from Newcastle University in England, she worked as a trainee banker in 1982 for two weeks then working for IBM as a marketing representative while moonlighting as a blues singer and pianist by night. Yasmin began her career in advertising as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather and in 1993 she moved to Leo Burnett as joint creative director with Ali Mohammed, eventually rising to executive creative director at the firm's Kuala Lumpur branch.
Her first feature-length film was Rabun in 2002. Mukhsin won an international children's best feature film award and special mention under the children's jury awards. Most of her commercials and films have been screened at the Berlin, San Francisco, Singapore international film festivals and the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival (not to be confused with the other Cannes Film Festival). Her films were featured in a special retrospective at the 19th Tokyo International Film Festival in October 2006. An April 2007 retrospective of her feature films was sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. In Singapore, Yasmin is best known for the pro-family commercials she did for the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. Yasmin was inducted into the Malaysian Advertising Hall of Fame by the Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia in November 2008. Yasmin was working on her first feature film to be filmed in Singapore titled, "Go, Thaddeus!" when she died. This was to be an inspirational film for the 2010 Youth Olympic Games, based on the book, "Running the full distance: Thaddeus Cheong" by Belinda Wee about Singapore's 17-year-old National triathlete who died after completing the 2007 SEA Games time trial.
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