Uzair Merchant Visits Middle East Bridging The Vancouver

Uzair Merchant Visits Middle East Bridging The Vancouver

Uzair Merchant Visits Middle East Bridging The Vancouver

One of the components of his visit was to build a bridge between Hollywood and Bollywood in the Middle East bridging the Vancouver and Canadian film industry with the Bollywood industry in Dubai. Part of this led him to Doha where he met with the Virginia Commonwealth University where he was a guest lecturer for a group of future Women Middle Eastern filmmakers and ended up shooting a music video with two artists from Qatar – Saad and Abood with Waleed his producer. This is all for the next book 8th Sin that we are releasing in the next couple of weeks. With that, we are now bridging both sides of the world and the track also has other features from Bollywood on it. Parallelly we are trying to build a curriculum to teach within the region.

After Doha he was in Dubai and ended up teaching a filmmaking workshop for the youth (kids) between 5-14 yrs as a part of the Bloom Academy Initiative. This initiative provides 1 Million dirhams per kid for 2 kids that pay for their entire educational career ahead as artists and filmmakers. So if they want to become artists or filmmakers they get a million dirhams for their entire education. He was teaching a program to those kids as part of that program.

In Vancouver, on 27th Jan 2022 Uzair was part of a delegation where he met with the Mayor of Vancouver who announced on the day that the 29th of January is officially recognized as ‘Hate Against Islamophobia’ and in Remembrance of Kobe Mosque bombings. Uzair was the representative for artists and filmmakers from the Muslim community in Vancouver and Canada for the delegation.

As a part of the initiative we are trying to establish that art can bridge peace and the only way to fight a war is to build communities that tell honest and artistic stories that can inspire people. So inspiration is the biggest thing to take back from.

In terms of film, he is currently building a universe called The Kreativ Universe which is like his own little marvel. That has been going on for a decade and now we are launching this entire universe in phases and a part of that is launching the books with music videos. 8th Sin – the second book is meant to release and it is in English with an Arabic and Bollywood hip-hop song. That’s the creative front.

Towards the end of 2022, Uzair started this entire process by teaching a Master Class in Production Design for Multichoice Talent Factory with New York Film Academy for the entire African continent. Multichoice Talent Factory is one of the largest filmmaking groups and initiatives and we were part of them to help spread the knowledge of what design can do in a film and how young filmmakers can elevate their entire game with this program.

Starting with the entire African continent and then two weeks later in Doha and a week later in Dubai and now we are currently developing the same kind of program for the first nations community in Vancouver and hopefully, we can run this program with them soon.