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Ian Iqbal Rashid
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Ian Iqbal Rashid
Ian Iqbal Rashid (born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and poet, known for his volumes of poetry, for his work on the Peabody Award-winning and Canadian Screen Award-winning HBO Max/CBC TV series Sort Of (2021–2023), for writing on the cult British TV series This Life (1996), and for directing the feature films Touch of Pink (2004) and How She Move (2007), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.
Of Indian ancestry and raised in the Ismaili Muslim faith, Rashid's family lived in colonial East Africa for generations. Rashid's family was forced to leave Tanzania when he was a small child. After failing to secure asylum in the UK and US, they settled in Toronto. Rashid began his career as an arts journalist, critic, curator, and events programmer, particularly focussed on South Asian diasporic, Muslim and LGBTQ+ cultural work.
Rashid began working as a writer in UK television in the late 1990s, trained on the BBC's Black Screen internship. His early credits include Dilly Downtown, and the soap London Bridge (Carlton Television for ITV). For BBC's Woman's Hour Programme, Rashid wrote and directed Leaving Normal, a comedy serial about same-sex adoption starring Imelda Staunton and Meera Syal. Rashid first attracted notice for the cult, BAFTA-winning BBC TV series, This Life, for which he won a Writer's Guild of Great Britain award. Since then, Rashid has written for broadcasters and companies such as Showtime, Lionsgate, Amazon Prime Video, ITV (TV network) and Sphere Media.
Between 2021 and 2023, he wrote and co-executive produced across three seasons of the critically acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning TV series Sort Of, which has appeared on many end-of-year best lists. For Sort Of, he has been nominated for Best Writing in a Comedy Series at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards and at the 2022 Writers Guild of Canada Awards for his work on the episode titled "Sort Of Mary Poppins".
Rashid is currently developing Nobel Prize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Afterlives into a series for Razor Film and Warp Films. He also has projects in development with Crave and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.[citation needed]
Self-taught as a filmmaker, in 1991, Rashid made the short film Bolo Bolo! with Kaspar Saxena. The film, part of an HIV/AIDS cable access series called Toronto Living With AIDS, resulted in the series being pulled from Rogers Television after complaints about sexually suggestive content, though it later screened at film festivals internationally. Rashid went on to write two award-winning short films, Surviving Sabu (1999, Arts Council of England) and Stag (2001, BBC Films).
Touch of Pink, Rashid's first feature film, spent 12 years in development. In 2003, he finally had the chance to direct the project as a Canada-UK co-production. It premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim, a bidding war, and eventually, a sale to Sony Picture Classics. The film has attracted extensive scholarly commentary. In 2024, the Sanghum Film Collective hosted a 20th-anniversary screening and celebration of the film at the legendary Paradise Theatre in Toronto.
His second feature film as a director, How She Move, received a similarly positive reception at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, where it was nominated for a Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and subsequently purchased by Paramount Vantage. The film opened to positive reviews and strong box office.
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Ian Iqbal Rashid
Ian Iqbal Rashid (born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and poet, known for his volumes of poetry, for his work on the Peabody Award-winning and Canadian Screen Award-winning HBO Max/CBC TV series Sort Of (2021–2023), for writing on the cult British TV series This Life (1996), and for directing the feature films Touch of Pink (2004) and How She Move (2007), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.
Of Indian ancestry and raised in the Ismaili Muslim faith, Rashid's family lived in colonial East Africa for generations. Rashid's family was forced to leave Tanzania when he was a small child. After failing to secure asylum in the UK and US, they settled in Toronto. Rashid began his career as an arts journalist, critic, curator, and events programmer, particularly focussed on South Asian diasporic, Muslim and LGBTQ+ cultural work.
Rashid began working as a writer in UK television in the late 1990s, trained on the BBC's Black Screen internship. His early credits include Dilly Downtown, and the soap London Bridge (Carlton Television for ITV). For BBC's Woman's Hour Programme, Rashid wrote and directed Leaving Normal, a comedy serial about same-sex adoption starring Imelda Staunton and Meera Syal. Rashid first attracted notice for the cult, BAFTA-winning BBC TV series, This Life, for which he won a Writer's Guild of Great Britain award. Since then, Rashid has written for broadcasters and companies such as Showtime, Lionsgate, Amazon Prime Video, ITV (TV network) and Sphere Media.
Between 2021 and 2023, he wrote and co-executive produced across three seasons of the critically acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning TV series Sort Of, which has appeared on many end-of-year best lists. For Sort Of, he has been nominated for Best Writing in a Comedy Series at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards and at the 2022 Writers Guild of Canada Awards for his work on the episode titled "Sort Of Mary Poppins".
Rashid is currently developing Nobel Prize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Afterlives into a series for Razor Film and Warp Films. He also has projects in development with Crave and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.[citation needed]
Self-taught as a filmmaker, in 1991, Rashid made the short film Bolo Bolo! with Kaspar Saxena. The film, part of an HIV/AIDS cable access series called Toronto Living With AIDS, resulted in the series being pulled from Rogers Television after complaints about sexually suggestive content, though it later screened at film festivals internationally. Rashid went on to write two award-winning short films, Surviving Sabu (1999, Arts Council of England) and Stag (2001, BBC Films).
Touch of Pink, Rashid's first feature film, spent 12 years in development. In 2003, he finally had the chance to direct the project as a Canada-UK co-production. It premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim, a bidding war, and eventually, a sale to Sony Picture Classics. The film has attracted extensive scholarly commentary. In 2024, the Sanghum Film Collective hosted a 20th-anniversary screening and celebration of the film at the legendary Paradise Theatre in Toronto.
His second feature film as a director, How She Move, received a similarly positive reception at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, where it was nominated for a Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and subsequently purchased by Paramount Vantage. The film opened to positive reviews and strong box office.
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