Danyal Rasheed is a filmmaker working between Toronto and Pakistan, known for a body of work that navigates memory, displacement, and the sacred. His key projects include A Walnut Tree (2015), Mela Chiragan: A Few Rhymes (2018), and Hatak (2020).
Hatak, a short fiction film based on a story by renowned Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, screened at international festivals including IFFSA Toronto (2021) and DCSAFF (2022). His feature documentary A Walnut Tree offers a haunting glimpse into the lives of internally displaced people in Pakistan’s conflict-ridden FATA region, premiering at IDFA (2015) and Hot Docs (2016).
In Mela Chiragan: A Few Rhymes, Rasheed turns his lens to the ecstatic rituals of the annual mela at the shrine of Sufi poet Shah Hussain. The film screened at Open Doors (Locarno Film Festival) and the Freiburger Film Forum in 2021.