Yemeni director Sara Ishaq achieves the extraordinary

While she was making her film, Sara Ishaq was thinking of posting it on YouTube. She thought that if she succeeded in showing her film on one of the big pan-Arab satellite channels, she would have scored a major goal.

It never occurred to the 29-year-old Yemeni-Scottish director that her film on the Yemeni revolution would take her even higher — all the way to the Oscars in Los Angeles, the first Yemeni ever and one of few Arabs to reach that stage.

“I was not expecting the film to enter any festival,” says Ishaq in an interview withtabloid!. “We wanted to make a film and post it on YouTube so everybody would know about what was happening in Yemen,” she added.

So when she received emails from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisers of the Oscars, she thought it was spam and deleted them — more than once.

Ishaq’s film, Karamah Has No Walls (Dignity Has No Walls) was shortlisted for the short documentaries category at the annual film awards.