About the Director: Ahmed worked as a professional actor in Karachi during the early-to-mid nineties, performing lead roles in several major stage and television productions in Pakistan. In 2008, he co-founded the ‘Kinky Fish Theatre Company’ in London, England and played Prospero in an Artaudian production of the Tempest which ran commercially for 3 nights at London’s Candid Arts Centre in 2009. He left England for Pakistan that year, but the Kinky Fish is still performing.

Ahmed later started Cinema Pure in Karachi, in 2013, as an independent platform for Pakistani film professionals to come together from time to time, as a collective, to work on projects that are not commercially motivated. The platform aims to (1) demonstrate that strong cinema can be produced on a limited budget, and (2) to explore the human experience with a focus on the narrative-power of light, movement and sound in the frame, rather than on expensive film technology. Mailay (Riff-Raff) is the second film made under the Cinema Pure banner.