Sherine Salama
Director
Sherine Salama is an award-winning observational filmmaker whose work focuses largely on the promotion of human rights in Australia and around the world.
Sherine was born in Cairo and moved to Australia with her family when she was three years old. Her father is Egyptian and her mother Palestinian. From 1989 she has travelled and worked throughout the Middle East basing herself in Cairo then Amman, where she worked as a freelance journalist.
Sherine is best known for A Wedding in Ramallah, which won her international acclaim and a string of awards including Best direction and Best Documentary at the Australian Film Institute Awards and the Grand Prix at the 2002 Cinema du Reel competition in Cannes. The film offers a unique insight into an arranged marriage between American-based Palestinian Bassam Abed and his young bride Mariam, brought up in a traditional village.
In The Last Days of Yasser Arafat (2004), Sherine delivers an intimate and compelling detail of life in the besieged compound of Yasser Arafat and secures what turned out to be the Palestinian leader’s very last interview. Arafat died one month after the recording.
