Ana Naomi de Sousa | Director

Ana Naomi de Sousa | Director

As a child, Ana always had a book in her hand, be it a novel or a poetry anthology. It was only many years later, while living in Rome, that she discovered film, falling in love with cinema ranging from Fellini masterpieces to Humphrey Bogart classics. She’s still a little surprised that she has ended up working in film, but she believes it’s the most meaningful medium for her to tell the stories she wants to share, with an incomparable magic to it.

After studying Modern Languages, Ana worked as a translator, living in Angola and Cape Verde. Travelling, and working with texts not in the English language, she realised how many stories are crying out to be told to a wider audience. This inspired her to consider journalism as a career, and she came back to the UK to train. An internship at the broadcaster Al-Jazeera turned into a job, and she worked her way up from a researcher to making her own films for the channel, before going freelance.

Ana is inspired by her experiences growing up as a young woman of colour in the UK, and uses her work to explore issues such as identity and post-colonialism, topics she is pleased to see getting more air time in recent years. She is currently working on a documentary film about British identity that has been five years in the making so far, as well as some fiction shorts. Ana is excited to be selected for Breakthrough UK and hopes the honour will help her continue to tell important stories, and reach mainstream audiences with her work.

Ana’s Breakthrough credit is feature film Naseem, Fight with Grace

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