DIRECTORS

Idil Ibrahim grew up in movie theaters. Her cousin managed some of the best of them, and she watched everything: auteur to mainstream, foreign to blockbuster. That education never left. It's why she directs with range, curiosity, and genuine love for the medium in all its forms. She shows up as a human first and a filmmaker second. That's how you get inside Shimo la Tewa, a maximum security prison in Mombasa housing accused pirates. It's how you get a real performance from someone who has never been in front of a camera. It's how you earn the kind of access that makes a story land.

She has directed and worked across Africa (including Timbuktu), the Middle East, Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and North America — with electricity and without. She has filmed in post-conflict environments across Somalia, Lebanon, Kenya, and Morocco, operating alongside security details, both armed and unarmed. A San Francisco Film Society Rainin Fellow and TIFF Writer's Studio Fellow (a program for writer/directors), she wrote and produced on Season 2 of Apple TV+'s Little America and received a Humanitas Prize nomination. She has attended Sundance across more than a decade: as an associate producer in 2009 and 2010, as a producer through the Sundance Institute in 2014, and as a member of the creative and BTS team at VICE on Fishing Without Nets, which won the Grand Jury Prize that same year. She returned in 2023 as a panelist through BlackHouse and Queen Collective. She was selected as a director for Queen Latifah's Queen Collective through Tribeca. She has spoken at the United Nations. She wants to make prestige film and television, anywhere in the world, at any scale. She is not against comedy. She laughs a lot.