Sally El Hosaini
Sally El-Hosaini ( ) is a Welsh-Egyptian BAFTA nominated film director and screenwriter. Background El-Hosaini was born in Swansea, Wales, of Egyptian and Welsh parentage, and raised in Cairo, Egypt. El-Hosaini completed her high school education at Atlantic College, one of the United World Colleges, in Wales. She went on to read Arabic with Middle Eastern Studies at Durham University. Before making films she taught English literature at a girls' school in Sana'a, Yemen, and worked for Amnesty International. She is a long-time resident of Hackney, London. Career El Hosaini was a trainee to the late renegade theatre director, John Sichel. She began her career working on Middle East documentaries and then moved to independent feature films, where she was a production coordinator for many years. She has stated that her work in British television documentaries felt "formulaic", and that she found she could be more truthful in fiction. She was the script editor/specialist researcher of the BAFTA and Emmy Award winning HBO Films/BBC Drama mini-series House of Saddam. She spent 2 years in research for the series, which won a Grierson Award for best factual drama. She received a regional (Welsh) BAFTA for her 2008 short film, The Fifth