Amirah Tajdin
Directing
Biography
Amirah Tajdin is a Kenyan artist and filmmaker. She graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Photography) in South Africa and Goucher College Maryland (USA). Over a ten year period of film-making she has crafted a signature style of blending reality with fiction through her strong visual language in both her commercial and cinematic work. This has seen her helm campaigns for branded content, fashion films, music videos and TVCs for brands such as Cadillac, Saudi Telecom, Bloomingdales, Virgin Mobile, Pepsi and the Louvre Abu Dhabi make up some of her portfolio.
Known For

When a mysterious train accident forces a man to change his plans, he is confronted with a series of choices. Each decision he makes leads to a different scenario, each one filmed by a different director with a different cast.
Train Station

Laura, a heartbroken teenager from Santiago is on holiday in the southern Chilean archipelago of Chiloé with friends. As she wanders the lonely island seascapes she encounters a group of local seaweed collector women, with whom she shares places and stories.
Land Tides

A poetic short that chronicles a drag queen having a nervous breakdown at a train station in an African city.
Fluorescent Sin

The music of lovers on screen is a melancholic exploration of how the very act of expressing private love is a form of quiet rebellion against the loneliness of immigrant life outside one’s home country.
Negotiating Liberation: Don't Be A Dream, Please Be Real
A neon inspired meditation on female energy re-imagined through the intricate histories of the Gulf region as told through music, fashion and poetry. The film features a 'Khaleeji' ten piece band of folk singers who spread their music through a Futuristic space while a poetess who grapples with her modern female identity as an Arab woman, chases their sounds and discovers her traditional self as well as the troupe of women rooted comfortably in their old world identity. The film is a collaboration between fashion designer Faissal El Malak who conceptualized it and filmmaker and artist Amirah Tajdin who directed it.
Embroidery For A Long Song

A meditation on femininity and the magic of being a woman, a girl, a daughter. Minerva's Lilies centres on two sisters, Leah and Nayomi aged, 9 and 10 as they go through the motions of 'being girls'. The visual meditation forms the experience of not only the girls' little world of magic but that of the viewer and their mother who is carefully perched around their dreamlike atmosphere.