Maysoon Pachachi

Maysoon Pachachi is of Iraqi origin, speaks English, Arabic, French and Italian and was educated in Iraq, the USA and Britain. She studied Philosophy at University College London (BA Hons) and Film at the Slade School of Art under Thorold Dickinson where visiting lecturers included Jean Renoir and Gillo Pontecorvo. She now lives in Britain.

Pachachi performed in Britain and France with The Bread and Puppet Theatre from the US and went on to form her own street theatre company in London. She graduated from the London International Film School where she studied under tutors such as Mike Leigh and Les Blair and in her last year directed Strike ’36, a 35 mm black & white short fiction film shown on the BBC and at the National Film Theatre. For many years she worked as a film editor on TV documentaries and dramas such as The Flame Trees of Thika, Widows, Minder and Fairly Secret Army. She also edited Canadian-UK co-produced feature film PAINTED ANGELS starring Brenda Fricker, Kelly McGillis and Bronagh Gallagher.

She produced and edited Channel Four (UK) documentary VOICES FROM GAZA (Red Ribbon Award, American Film and Video Festival, San Francisco). Also for Channel Four she produced and directed IRAQI WOMEN - VOICES FROM EXILE and produced, directed and edited SMOKE for Hamlyn Prize winner, Brazilian artist Lucia Nogueira.

She directed Iranian Journey, a feature length documentary road movie for ZDF/ARTE (First Prize, Kalamata International Documentary Festival, 2000) and Living with the Past: People and Monuments in Medieval Cairo, a one-hour documentary, for ECHO Productions (USA). Her most recent film, which she co-directed, produced and edited is Bitter Water, a feature-length documentary about four generations of refugees in a Palestinian camp in Beirut.

Pachachi has also taught film and video directing and editing in Jerusalem and Gaza for the Jerusalem Film Institute and Med Media, a programme of the European Union and at Birzeit University in Ramallah.

She is currently developing films to be shot in Iraq, a series of documentaries about women and globalisation and writing a feature film about Middle Eastern and Latin American immigrants in London, which she will direct. The script was accepted for a SOURCES II workshop, part of the Media 2 programme.

Iranian Journey
A film by Maysoon Pachachi, Produced by Noura Sakkaf and Iraj Emami, 1999, 54 min., Color
Massoumeh Soltan Baloghie is the first woman long-distance bus driver in Iran and perhaps in the Islamic world. Iraqi filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi joins...

Iraqi Women
A film by Maysoon Pachachi, 1994, 54 min., Color
IRAQI WOMEN—VOICES FROM EXILE provides a fascinating and rare look at the recent history of Iraq through the eyes and experiences of Iraqi women livin...