June 2003. I am just a child.

My father is heading to the hospital where eleven police cadets from our Hazara community lie dead after a targeted attack. I want to go with him. He looks at me carefully: "My son, it's better if only one family member goes out. If something happens to me, at least another male needs to stay alive."

I watch him leave, not knowing if he'll return.

This is how I learned that in Quetta, Pakistan, where over 2,400 Hazaras have been killed in two decades, survival is never guaranteed. A month later, a friend invites me to Friday prayers. Halfway there on our bicycles, for no reason, I turn around. An hour later, suicide bombers kill 51 people at that mosque. Had I not turned back, this story wouldn't exist.

I learned to tell stories by photographing the dead.

In January 2013, I survived twin suicide bombings that killed over 130 people. A month later, another massive blast hit Hazara Town. I was working as an animator, but that day I grabbed a camera and ran toward the destruction. I photographed two girls weeping over their father's coffin. The image went viral.

That's when I understood: some stories demand to be told.

I left Quetta to study Film and Television at the National College of Arts in Lahore, then earned an exchange spot at the University of Texas at Austin, where I co-wrote my first feature film. The following year, as a Qalambaaz fellow in Pakistan's first screenwriting workshop, I wrote another. Before graduation, the BBC hired me.

For six years as a BBC Video Journalist, I covered Pakistan's most dangerous regions, trained colleagues in conflict storytelling, and specialized in high-risk production. Fellowships followed; Pakistan Photo Festival, Goethe Institute's Film Talents Program, sharpening my craft while I documented migration, terrorism, and survival.

In 2023, I moved to Sydney to complete a Master of Moving Image at the University of Sydney. Now I'm finishing Green Hell, a decade long documentary following Hazara refugees trapped in Indonesia, and developing If I Were a prophet, about a former Taliban child recruit turned poet trekking through the Karakoram Mountains seeking redemption.

I tell stories about people who refuse to disappear.

People who survive impossible things and have the most important stories to tell.

(Currently, I volunteer with Australian Red Cross' Young Parents Program where I shoot and edit documentaries.)