Koutaiba Al-Janabi is an award winning, truly independent filmmaker and photographer from Baghdad.

He has been directing and producing his own short films, documentaries and feature films for 30 years. He is striving to create a new direction, an individual style of independent cinema, where the camera, the lighting creates feelings and emotions, his own way to telling stories.

For his first independently produced feature film Leaving Baghdad he received a British Independent Film Award, won first prize in Dubai at the Gulf Film Festival, a nomination for Cinema for Peace in Berlin, a special prize at the Monaco Film Festival.

His second feature-length film, a creative documentary, Stories of Passers Through won the Best International Experimental Film award at the London International Motion Picture Awards, and both are still being selected for festivals. Koutaiba premiered his third feature film at the BFI Southbank, London: The Woodman, a thriller-fairy tale about outsiders, strangers, completing his trilogy of truly independent films – art of exile.

Koutaiba’s photographic work has been published and exhibited worldwide and is part of Memories Carried, an international touring exhibition by Art Forward in collaboration with Amnesty International UK, and was exhibited as part of Document Now: No Borders at The RSA, London.