Susan Youssef / Habibi
Susan Youssef was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Staten Island. At 22, she moved to Beirut to teach for the summer and to work at the local paper. Visting the Palestininan camps and hooking up with the Lebanese filmmaker community sowed the filmmaking seeds in her. Back in the states, she got her degree from the University of Texas in Austin. She was in Texas on 9/11 when the towers got hit. In 2002 she visited Palestine for the first time, and that inspired her to start making films about the region. Her short film "Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf" was one of the first fiction films in the US to feature a veiled protagonist. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. Habibi is her first feature.
Susan Youssef was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Staten Island. At 22, she moved to Beirut to teach for the summer and to work at the local paper. Visting the Palestininan camps and hooking up with the Lebanese filmmaker community sowed the filmmaking seeds in her. Back in the states, she got her degree from the University of Texas in Austin. She was in Texas on 9/11 when the towers got hit. In 2002 she visited Palestine for the first time, and that inspired her to start making films about the region. Her short film "Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf" was one of the first fiction films in the US to feature a veiled protagonist. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. Habibi is her first feature.
Susan Youssef was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Staten Island. At 22, she moved to Beirut to teach for the summer and to work at the local paper. Visting the Palestininan camps and hooking up with the Lebanese filmmaker community sowed the filmmaking seeds in her. Back in the states, she got her degree from the University of Texas in Austin. She was in Texas on 9/11 when the towers got hit. In 2002 she visited Palestine for the first time, and that inspired her to start making films about the region. Her short film "Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf" was one of the first fiction films in the US to feature a veiled protagonist. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. Habibi is her first feature.