Taghreed Elsanhouri

Taghreed Elsanhouri

Biography

Born in the province of Dongola in North Sudan, Taghreed Elsanhouri moved to Great Britain with her family in 1979. There she studied Sociology and English at the University of Kent as well as Development Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where she hopes to return to do a doctorate. She worked for various television and radio stations in the Middle East for over ten years. As producer at the "Middle East Broadcasting Center" in Dubai her work included making a series of documentaries about traditional children’s games in the Gulf states, and for the Al Jazeera TV station she profiled people from the Arab World who had made a career for themselves in the West. More recently she has started to work on her own writing and film-making projects. These have included video installations with which she tried – after the suicide bomb attacks in London – to question what martyrdom means to Muslims.
The film "All About Darfur" in 2006 was her first full-length documentary that she directed herself: "When I was asked in 2004 why I borrowed a camera from a friend and travelled to Sudan to make this film, I replied that I felt something of an emotional obligation to travel to my country of birth during this important time. When the film was then screened at the British Council in Khartoum in 2005 in front of an ethnically mixed Sudanese audience, it became clear to me that my emotional reasoning for shooting the film was only part of the answer. I was just as passionate about making a film in which normal Sudanese people have the opportunity to offer up their point of view, so that they feel the film is just as much for them as it is for the rest of the world. When I watched the film with a Sudanese audience, I felt like a daughter who had returned home."

Filmography

All about Darfur (2005): Screenplay, Direction