Director's Bio
[francais]

Arshad Khan was born in 1975 in Pakistan. Growing up in a creative and artistic family, he took keen interest in visual arts and making home movies. At sixteen he migrated to Canada with his family.

Arshad’s artistic interests expanded from painting to acting, directing, writing, journalism and pursuing a degree in Architecture. He worked as the art editor of "raj palta", an insightful and political South Asian youth magazine catering to the massive South Asian population of the greater Toronto area.

In 1998 Arshad started a career in the travel industry while still at Architecture school. Travelling around the world gave him the opportunity to open his mind and heart and appreciate global diversity.

At the turn of this century Arshad was a student at Ryerson University architecture school and disinterested in religion or politics. He was oblivious of what was going on in the world outside of my own existence. 9/11 changed the way he viewed himself and the world. He felt forced to confront his religion, beliefs, politics and most of all, his Pakistani heritage.

Arshad became a peace activist trying to stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He went to all the anti-war demonstrations and rallies. In 2003 the war against Iraq was waged and he felt hopeless. This is when sweeping anti-terror arrests started in Canada.

In the summer of 2003, the Canadian police (RCMP) caught a suspected terror cell in Toronto. The RCMP's terror sweep was labelled “Project Thread”. Arshad joined an activist group in Toronto called Project Threadbare that came together in response to the arrests, once it was clear that those arrests were made under wrong implications. The Muslim and Pakistani community wanted nothing to do with the Project Thread victims due to the taint of terrorism attached to them.

Arshad dropped out of Architecture school and set out to help get the victims of Project Thread out of jail. He taught himself film editing and tried to capture the struggle of the Project Thread victims on tape.

Over the last four years, Arshad has struggled to complete this film without any external funding. “Threadbare” is the winner of an NFB film maker's assistance program grant for post-production assistance and is premiering at the Mumbai International Film Festival in February 2008.

"Threadbare" is Arshad Khan’s first feature documentary.