Award-winning Pakistani documentary filmmaker Shehzad Hameed Ahmad has been on a winning streak lately as he is bagging accolades one after the other. Recently, he bagged an award at the New York Festivals 2021 for a record 7th time. The filmmaker clinched the Bronze Global Award for his documentary film Brazil’s Amazonian Battle in the Environment and Ecology category.
To film this documentary, Shehzad went on a dangerous journey deep inside Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest to film with the Mundurukku Tribe whose protected lands were being infiltrated by armed gold miners. Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazons increased 30% since Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro came to power.
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More than 120,000 square kilometres of the Amazon forest have been destroyed: an area about a fifth the size of Wales in the last 10 years. That’s the size of 8.4 million football fields. It’s displaced around 400 indigenous groups but has also decimated a vast store of carbon that is vital for tackling climate change. The jungles produce 20% of the world’s oxygen. The filmmaker went on an investigative journey to reveal the gold rush pushing communities over the edge.
Shehzad has previously won a Gold World Medal at the New York Festivals in 2016 for his documentary Flight of the Falcons, a Silver World Medal for Kasur’s Lost Children in 2017, a Silver World Medal for Rise and Fall of Mujib and a Bronze for Nepal’s Child Brides in 2019, followed by two silvers for Whiter Shade of Terror and Caught in the Crossfire in 2020.
His work has focused on a wide array of issues that include covering human rights violations in war zones like Afghanistan to the jungles of Poso and Marawi – embedding with militaries in the most dangerous locations in the world. He’s managed to film with difficult-to-access characters like Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed in Pakistan, white supremacist militias in the United States to investigating social issues such as the rise of child brides in Nepal, coral bleaching of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the illegal deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil.
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Shehzad has also won 3 Global Media Awards in Germany, Green Image Award in Japan, Silver Award at the 2020 Handle Climate Change Film Festival in China, Mediacorp News Award of the Year 2015 in Singapore, Pakistan’s Agahi Journalist of the Year 2016, Tagore Film Festival 2020 and 2021, Sweden Film Award 2021, Canada International Film Festival 2020, Gender Equality Impact Change-maker (Male) by United Women Singapore 2020 amongst others.
He has filmed documentaries across Brazil, Bangladesh, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, United States, Pakistan, Philippines, Afghanistan, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia and Nepal. They have re-broadcast on Al Jazeera, TVF International, Toggle, Dawn News, National Geographic, TV Ontario, Channel NewsAsia and Crime and Investigation Channel amongst others. Shehzad Hameed is a Fulbright scholar with a Master’s degree from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in News and Documentary Journalism.
Watch his winning speech here:
https://vimeo.com/613352671
