Purpose over prestige

My guest Amal Al-Agroobi became a successful neuroscientist to please her family and then ditched the title of DR. to follow her passion of becoming a director, filmmaker, producer and writer.

Amal shares the challenges she was faced with as an Arab woman living in the UAE when she started off directing Arab-centric documentaries about identity and social injustices and then moved into genre filmmaking and writing for television. Amal chose herself by refusing to conform to what society expected of her and moved to England where she continues to create films with a passion.

This is an inspirational story of choosing purpose over prestige.

Points discussed in this episode:

• Why Amal decided to be a filmmaker after her success as a neuroscientist (1:00)
• As an Arab muslim woman, Amal was expected to marry and have a career that was accepted by society in the UAE (10:00)
• How Amal risked her family's reputation by not conforming (14:00)
• The success of Amal's documentary 'Half Emirati' in 2012 gained her family's respect and blessing (15:20)
• The theme of social injustice is at the seed of all of Amal's work (19:00)
• Documentary versus fiction (21:00)
• Amal shares her goal of becoming an auteur, to write and direct work that has a personal and unique stamp that becomes recognizable (22:45)
• The reveal of future plans to work with Amal in her upcoming short horror film (24:15)
• How an actor has the power to impact people on and off the camera(29:00)

Connect with Amal:

• Website: https://www.amalalagroobi.com
• Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/amalalagroobi/

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