Nadiah Hamzah
Directing
Biography
With her debut feature Motif, Nadiah Hamzah has been hailed as “one to watch” by The Hollywood Reporter. Her anti-bullying film for Save The Children, exploded online and has earned her a win at the Adfest, The One Show, and a Cannes Lion. Nadiah Hamzah was born and raised in Penang, Malaysia. After a brief stint as a copywriter in McCann Erickson, she enrolled in film school and graduated with an MFA (Film & TV) from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, training under the tutelage of some notable names in film, with one of them being Spike Lee.
Known For
When celebrity actress Ayra Natasha's glamorous life unravels in one humiliating night - a red carpet disaster, a cheating boyfriend, and a viral disappearance, she finds herself in the back seat of a stranger's car, ugly-crying into a box of tissues. Her unlikely rescuer is Imran Firdaus, an e-hailing driver with nowhere particular to be and no reason to care… except that he does. What begins as a forced arrangement - Imran hired as Ayra's personal driver to contain a tabloid storm slowly becomes the one real thing in both their lives. But Ayra belongs to a carefully constructed world of sponsors, film contracts, and a power couple narrative that her manager-sister Maya cannot afford to let fall apart. Kata Hati is a Malay-language romantic comedy about the words we perform for the world, and the ones we only dare say to the ones we love.
Kata Hati
Motif focuses on a police investigation and its most obvious innovation is the female perspective that the director imposes. Protagonist Dewi (Sharifah Amani) is a police officer who is sent from the capital of Kuala Lumpur to a provincial area, Tanah Merah (lit. “Red Earth”), to investigate the disappearance of the young daughter of the local community’s richest family. From the beginning, her arrival is greeted with distrust by her male colleagues, who are doubly annoyed by the fact of having an outsider who is also a woman intrude in the community.
Motif
The annual Chinese spring festival dinner gets a little complicated when the family's only son brings home his Senegalese girlfriend.
Benachin
For the longest time, Zaki has dreamed about coming to America. He enrolls himself in a business course and finds himself in New York City -- in an apartment with two illegal Indonesian immigrants; Ferdy and Mira, in Flushing, Queens. As he grapples with the harsh reality of living in the city, he finds himself slowly attracted to Mira. She helps him realize the possibilities of starting life anew -- possibilities that are threatened by an impending marriage and his awaited return to Malaysia