Rubika Shah | Director/Writer

Rubika Shah | Director/Writer

Rubika grew up between the West Midlands and Saudi Arabia. It was writing diaries in a little lockable notebook that sparked her intense love of writing, but she didn’t consider it a career choice until after she had worked in the music industry. Rubika has had a varied career from video journalist for a newspaper company in Sydney to making nature documentaries for the National Geographic in Fiji but it was her first feature, the critically acclaimed documentary White Riot which marks her breakthrough moment. Marrying her music knowledge with her passion for film, Rubika shines a light on the ‘Rock Against Racism’ movement using archive footage, a fresh score and punk-style animation, inspired in part by the racism that her parents faced while they were growing up in the UK.

Her second feature will be Qisat Sauedia (A Saudi Tale), a drama in collaboration with previous BAFTA Breakthrough, Sarah Brocklehurst. She hopes to benefit massively from industry support. 

Rubika thinks that by being a BAFTA Breakthrough, she will have the much needed opportunity to network with her contemporaries and find other filmmakers to collaborate with but she also has the ambition of trying to hold open the door for other female filmmakers, to encourage diversity behind the camera as much as she can.