Biography
Sahera Dirbas is a Palestinian filmmaker born in Haifa. She graduated in Chemical Engineering from Technion’s Handasaem College in Haifa in 1987 and began producing documentaries and collaborating with international television channels such as the BBC and La Rai in the early 2000s.
This is also when she trained as a filmmaker, leading pitching seminars and workshops and producing her first short films: Stranger in My Home (2007), A Handful of Earth (2008), 138 Pounds in my Pocket (2009), Jerusalem Bride (2010), Deir Yassin Village and Massacre (2012), Between Heaven & Earth i Sumud (2015) and her latest documentary film, On The Doorstep in 2019. Her documentaries have been screened at many festivals, including the Al Ard Film Festival, the Alquds International Film Festival and other Palestinian film festivals in Europe and the United States.
She has also taught classes as supervisor of the project “Audiovisual documentary research, training and audiovisual production on the narrative and memory of women in the Palestinian territories”, workshops that prioritise women’s empowerment through cinematographic praxis and storytelling.
In 2013, she created different spots against gender violence and the oral memory of Palestinian women:Evicting violence from our life and History,No Violence against Women and WELOD Program – SPOT n.1 Campagna lotta alla violenza.
Sahera Dirbas works in Jerusalem as an independent filmmaker and producer.