Ashtar Al Khirsan began her career working in the BBC comedy department before enrolling in the National Film and Television School to study Fiction Direction. After graduating from the NFTS, she worked on feature projects and made several documentaries for the BBC. Her documentaries received strong critical acclaim and were screened at various international film festivals, including Edinburgh, London, Rotterdam and Chicago, where she won the Best Arts Documentary Film Award. Her feature film screenplay, Bird in a Storm, was developed with the support of Creative Europe Media and was selected for the Sources 2 Script Development Workshop. Funded by The Wellcome Trust, Abdullah and Leilah is her first work of fiction.