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Leeds director gives £10,000 film prize to charity
A Leeds director has won two awards and almost £10,000 in prize money at a famous film festival.
But Mohamed Al-Daradji, of Woodhouse-based Human Film, has pledged to donate every penny to charity.
The 32-year-old's film Son of Babylon won the Amnesty International Film Prize Award and the Peace Prize at the Berlin Festival which finished last weekend.
But he will give the winnings (5,000 euros from each award) to the Iraqi's Missing charity which the film company helped to launch in Berlin.
It is devoted to finding the estimated hundreds of thousands of missing people who disappeared during the various wars in Iraq.
The director, who splits his time living in Leeds and Baghdad, said: "I would like to thank the juries honouring Son of Babylon with such prestigious awards for the film and my country, Iraq. I would like to dedicate this award to our Iraq's Missing Campaign.
"If God wills we will give answers to my main character Shehzad Hussen who for the last 22 years has been searching for her husband and also for my sister whose husband disappeared five months ago."
The film is set in Iraq in 2003 and follows grandmother Um-Ibrahim (played by Shehzad Hussen) as she tries to find her soldier son who has been missing since the first Gulf War in 1991.
She takes along her 12-year-old grandson Ahmed (Yassir Talib) after they hear of mass graves being uncovered in another part of the country.
The film uses their journey from the mountains of the north to the southern sands to reveal the hidden horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The film and the campaign are being supported by the Minister of Human Rights in Iraq, Wijdan Makha'il Salim.
Son of Babylon is Al-Daradji's second feature length film. His first, Ahlaam, was screened at over 125 international film festivals and represented Iraq in the Oscar and Golden Globe Awards of 2007.
Son of Babylon was also selected for Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival in America in January.
Producer Isabelle Stead, 30, who jetted out to the festival with screenwriter Jenny Norridge from Garforth, said: "I hope the campaign will inspire a high-profile approach to human rights violations that will no longer go unnoticed by the world."
The company was set up in 2006 by three Leeds Metropolitan University film graduates – Mohamed, 32, Isabelle, from Pudsey and 26-year-old Danny Evans, from Morley.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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