Farah Nabulsi

Farah Nabulsi (فرح النابلسي; born 1978) is a British-Palestinian filmmaker and human rights activist. For her short film The Present, she was nominated for an Academy Award and won the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film.

Early life
Nabulsi was born and raised in London, and is the daughter of a Palestinian mother and Palestinian-Egyptian father. Her father came to the UK to study for a PhD in civil engineering and her mother arrived via Kuwait when her family left Palestine following the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Nabulsi attended Francis Holland School for girls and is a graduate of Cass Business School, London.

In her late 30s, she switched her career after working in the city as a CFA-qualified stockbroker at a boutique investment bank, and later JP Morgan. She made the decision following a trip to Palestine in 2013 for the first time as an adult to trace her family roots.

Film career
In 2016, she founded Native Liberty Productions, a not-for-profit media production company, that aims to re-humanize the Palestinians and draw attention to the injustices they face. She is also the founder of oceansofinjustice.com, a digital resource that deconstructs the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.

Nabulsi has been invited to screen her work and speak at various events, including the United Nations Headquarters in New York; where she addressed the delegates in the Trustee Chamber Council.

In 2021, Nabulsi's directorial debut The Present was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. On 10 April, 2021 it won the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film; the only short that was up for both awards. The Present went on to win over 30 awards at various film festivals around the world.

Her feature film, The Teacher, premiered on September 9, 2023 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film tells the story of a grief-ridden Palestinian school teacher, Basem, who becomes very involved in the lives of two of his students, Adam and Yacoub, when their home is bulldozed. Throughout the film, Basem attempts to reconcile his role as a father figure to Adam and Yacoub and his commitment to the Palestinian resistance, all in the midst of an ongoing incident in which an IDF soldier, the son of an American diplomat, is being held hostage.