Liguria, Italy (2019)

Hisham Bizri is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. He began his cinema career working as an assistant director to Raúl Ruiz in New York and Miklós Jancsó in Budapest. Across his career in production, he served as President and Creative Director of Levantine Films, Creative Director at Orbit Communications, and co-founded The Arab Institute of Film.

He has directed 29 short films and written numerous screenplays, drawing adaptations from sources as varied as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bible, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tayeb Salih, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and Henry James. In 2023, he wrote, co-produced, and released his debut dramatic feature, Elektra (now streaming on Netflix and Apple TV+).

A recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andrei Tarkovsky Award for Best Director, and the Cairo International Film Festival’s Best Screenplay Prize, his work has been supported by the Rockefeller, Ford, Jerome, McKnight, and Bogliasco foundations. His films have screened widely, including at Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes, Berlin, Oberhausen, Moscow, Milan, the Louvre, Cinémathèque Française, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and Anthology Film Archives.

Bizri studied cinema at Boston, Harvard, and Chicago universities, and has taught at MIT, NYU, the University of Chicago, UC Davis, and as a tenured Professor of Cinema at Brown University. He lives and works between Paris, Berlin, and New York City.