Rough Cut Lab Africa
London born Libyan-Capetonian, Khalid is a documentary director, producer and editor with a film-
making practice spanning over more than 25 years. Having studied film language in London Khalid
worked in the film industries of the UK, Middle East and Southern Africa and now runs his production
company tubafilms from South Africa and is based in Maputo, Mozambique. Khalid works and
researches as a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the
Western Cape.
Khalid is founder and director of Rough Cut Lab Africa RCLA, a support programme for African
documentaries at the rough cut stage in association with SAGE and Encounters South African International Documentary film festival.
Khalid’s practice is strongly dedicated to the pedagogy of independent filmmaking and story
construction in Africa, teaching and consulting in and outside film institutions and organized
frameworks. He describes his practice in his own words as moving at vastly different paces: while his
own films have taken up to seven years to finish, he constructs and completes numerous films every
year as an editor, turning his practice into a “strange place of directing directors, guiding first time
filmmakers, imbibing worlds alien to [his] own, containing and creating another’s vision, manifesting the
dreams of the subjects in the films and being taken by the voice of the material itself”.