Claim to fame: Turning the urban crime genre on its head
Her story: The British tradition of “gritty realism” may have hit highs through the work of fellow British women Lynn Ramsay, Clio Barnard and Andrea Arnold, but in lesser hands it has also been done to death. Last year, Welsh-Egyptian director El-Hosaini burst onto the scene with “My Brother the Devil”, a film that at first appears to be a fairly conventional, if well-constructed, urban drama about two brothers drawn towards a life of crime. But then the plot veers into totally unexpected territory, transforming the narrative into a bold and vital deconstruction of contemporary masculinity. This makes sense of – and more than justifies – the long struggle El-Hosaini faced to get the film made.