Ziad H. Hamzeh
Production
Biography
Ziad’s body of work as a director, producer and writer has earned over fifty awards and honors. Most recently, Ziad produced the Tunisian hit film Take My Breath. The film has been selected to represent Tunisia at 2025, 97th Oscars for best international film. This year, Ziad wrote, produced, and directed Hello Beautiful based on the best-selling book Walk Beside Me by Christine Handy. Earlier in 2023, Ziad produced the Rwandan film Upstanding and the critically acclaimed The Island of Forgiveness with Claudia Cardinale. He Executive produced the Iranian film Forbidden Womanhood. Prior work includes producing The Flower of Aleppo starring Hend Sabry and executive produced Dreams I Never Had starring Malcolm McDowell and Robin Givens. The Flower of Aleppo was honored as Tunisia’s entry into both the 2017 Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. Irrefutable Proof, a dramatic thriller Ziad directed and produced, swept the Beverly Hills Film Festival earning three of the fest's highest awards: the Golden Palm, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography. He received the Abu Dhabi Film Festival's Black Pearl Award for Best Producer for the film Always Brando, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Always Brando also received the Best Picture Award from the Alexandria Film Festival and the Jury Prize from the Algerian Film Festival. Ziad's documentary The Letter: An American Town and the Somali Invasion premiered at AFI film festival and was chosen as the opening film Amnesty International film festival. The Letter won numerous awards and accolades and was heralded as Critics Pick by New York Magazine. Woman, a documentary Ziad shot on location in Syria, once again earned Ziad the Beverly Hills Film Festival's highest honor, the Golden Palm Award. ¡Henry O! garnered Best Documentary honors at the BHFF as well as the Best of Fest Award from the Breckenridge Film Festival and the Accolades Award for Excellence in Film. His critically acclaimed feature film Shadow Glories has been heralded as “Powerful and distinctive. A mature, accomplished work...strong, stylish and uncompromising” by Kevin Thomas, film critic for The Los Angeles Times. Ziad is a member of the Producer's Guild of America serving on the diversity committee.
Known For

Hello Beautiful is a powerful and emotionally charged film that delves into the harrowing yet transformative journey of Willow, a successful model whose life is shattered by a devastating breast cancer diagnosis. Based on Christine Handy's bestselling novel Walk Beside Me, the film explores themes of identity, resilience, and the enduring strength of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable adversity.
Hello Beautiful

Salma is a 37 years old paramedic nurse working in private and public hospitals in Tunisia. When her only son, Murad, go to Syria to join the terrorist movement Al-Nusra Front, Salma infiltrate the jihadists with the aim to bring her son back to Tunisia.
The Flower of Aleppo

The contentment of community turns upside down as an American film crew invades its serenity. Seduction, greed, and betrayal devastates them all.
Always Brando

Andrea Licari, a Tunisian of Italian descent now 60 years of age, has become an accomplished author, college professor and a leading thinker in Rome. Today, Andrea finds himself facing the most challenging time of his life.
The Island of Forgiveness

A car crash prevents Jeanine Markham, a world-renowned astrophysicist, from delivering her controversial lecture about her findings. The accident puts Jeanine at the cross roads of conscious and subconscious, between Comatose and awake as she struggles to live. But even in her vegetative unresponsive state, her mind, slipping between the two realities, continues her quest to deliver the truth. For Jeanine's husband and others, accepting the irrefutable proof that she presents is unthinkable - that we're alone in the universe, that no deity hears or answers our prayers nor punishes our sins, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, and that our sufferings, indeed our lives and loves are ultimately pointless. Her journey, stuck between the two worlds, becomes shrouded by dark and mysterious events that create a whirlwind of tumultuous emotions and terrifying realizations.
Irrefutable Proof

The simple question: “How does a woman get pregnant?” forever shatters the childhood of a pre-teen girl entering into an innocent love triangle.
Forbidden Womanhood

ADRIFT- People of a Lesser God is the story of an incredible odyssey made by several-times Pulitzer Prize-nominated undercover reporter Dominique C. Mollard. In this gripping story, Mollard sails with 38 African migrants, among them a five-month-old baby, out of West Africa on a quest to reach the golden shores of Europe. All aboard are packed together like sardines in a leaky fishing canoe as they set off under full moon on their harrowing journey. ADRIFT-People of a Lesser God captures the struggle of these desperate migrants as they brave their way across the cold Atlantic, risking their lives in search for a better future. —Ziad H. Hamzeh
Adrift: People of a Lesser God

When Shams’ intersex identity is exposed, the young seamstress’ tranquil life unravels. Engaged in a steamy love triangle and targeted by an obsessive attacker, they escape to the capital city. Taking refuge with their lover’s mystic cousin, they grapple with their complex sense of self. This evocative tale explores the clash between desire and identity.
Take My Breath

A coming-of-age drama about a farmboy gaining the courage to tell his Papa about his secret passion: music.
A Cowboy Named Jazz

A middle-aged, down-and-out kickboxer, once contender for the heavyweight title, struggles to rebuild his shattered life as he makes his way back home to his lost love and his one last chance at redeeming his tortured soul.
Shadow Glories

Against the oppressive environment of religious fanaticism, political turmoil, archaic traditions, and the rise of fundamentalist Islamic movements, one extraordinary Arabian woman rises up in a personal, revealing, and dangerous quest to champion justice and equality for all women. WOMAN is a feature-length documentary based on the writings, lectures, and life of Nobel Prize nominee, activist Bouthaina Shaaban as she fearlessly ignites awareness while advancing the cause of rights for Arab women - from securing formal acknowledgments throughout the Arab world that women should be afforded basic human rights, to waging an international battle defending the integrity of the real Arab female, all accomplished with the firm hand of diplomacy and the power of her pen.
Woman
In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy a firestorm erupts when 1,100 Somali refugees relocate to predominately white Lewiston, Maine.