Roxana Vilk
Roxana Vilk has been a regular contributor to Highlight Arts. In 2011 she was commissioned to make a series of short films as part of Reel Festivals and in 2013 she came to Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan to make a number of short films in collaboration with various Iraqi and UK poets as part of the Reel Iraq Festival.
Roxana is a UK based filmmaker, musician and performer. She originally trained in theatre at the Lecoq School in Paris and then went on to receive an Masters in Fine Art specialising in Film from the Edinburgh College of Art. She frequently works cross art forms. She has produced plays and films in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia Herzegovina, France and Norway. Her film Tehran Backyard was nominated for a Royal Television Award, and won best film at Next Frame Film Festival in the US. She co-wrote the drama feature film Trouble Sleeping which won a Scottish BAFTA award. In 2013 Roxana directed a large scale site specific promenade performance with a cast of over 80 performers and musicians through the Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh, based on the 11th Century Persian text of Farud Al Din Al Atta called Conference of the Birds.
In 2012 she produced a six part TV series called Poets of Protest for Al Jazeera English Artscape series and directed 3 of the episodes. The series, looked at the Arab spring through the eyes of poets from the region and created experimental interpretations of their words. She was recently commissioned by Reel Festivals and funded by British Council and Literature Without Frontiers to create experimental short films in response to the words of Iraqi poets, filmed in Iraq in 2013.
In 2014 she made a new film for the BBC called Iranian Enough? She was commissioned by Commonwealth Year of Culture to make eight artistic films for the Commonwealth Games Glasgow. She is a singer and co-producer with the band GOL. In 2014 she was nominated for a Margaret Tait Award for her artistic work.
Roxana’s films screened at the Highlight Arts launch event in 2014 and featured at Reel Festivals 2013.
