Basil Khalil
Producer
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Producer Basil Khali's determination to make this film stems from his belief that it is a powerful story of human kind, exposing its soft side as well as the harsh side. He also believes that this film will be a wonderful and rare opportunity for Arabic cinema to flex its dramatic muscles, change opinions that people have of Arabs, build bridges with cinema lovers and tell a meaningful human story by and about the people of the Arab world. For him, the adaptation plays out the subversive humour of the novel from which it is drawn, in which human relations are depicted teetering between amusement and exasperation as much as anguish in the midst of historic tragedy.
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Biography
Basil was born and raised in the Northern Palestinian town of Nazareth, to an Arab father and an English-Irish mother.
In 2001, after completing a television production course in Canada, Basil landed his first film job as 2nd Assistant Director on the award winning Palestinian feature film Divine Intervention.
Basil tried to produce a few shorts in Palestine, but the Intifada made it impossible. So in 2002 he moved to Scotland, where he obtained a diploma in 3D animation and an MA in Screen Project Development from Screen Academy Scotland.
Basil formed Code 81 Films and produced his first feature documentary Replay Revenge, which went on to play at a number of international film festivals and sold to Al Jazeera English as a two part documentary. Since then Basil has produced a variation of work through his company, from short content television documentaries, short films and promotional films while at the same time developing a slate of feature films.
Basil is currently in development on a hybrid fiction-documentary feature set in China, a comedy set in Gaza and A Girl Made of Dust, a heartwarming drama from Lebanon in collaboration with the Blake-Fridmann agency in London.
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