Sahra Bhimji (nee Girshick) is a visionary filmmaker, educator, and surreal storyteller who juggles parenting with pitch decks, and brings magic to both the classroom and the cutting room. Her work blends the poetic with the practical—think genre-bending shorts, urban fairy tales, and high tech/low budget experiments. Passionate about performance, tech-savvy in virtual production and visual effects, and relentless in the pursuit of meaningful art, she turns small budgets into cinematic gold.
As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Sahra made her first short film, “The Girl with the Curl”, on a 16mm Bolex with a grant from the Stanford Film Society. From there, she has gone on to make dozens of short films on 16mm, Super-8, and digital video formats. Her films have screened at numerous film festivals including the London Short Film Festival, San Francisco Indie Fest, Broad Humor Film Festival, Albany Film Festival, Portobello Film Festival, the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival, San Diego International Children’s Film Festival, and the Aarhus Independent Arts Festivals. She has had success on the website Filmaka.com, where twice she has won the grand jury prize. Her film “Hot Air” stars David Armand (How not to live your life, Pixelface, Armstrong &Miller Show) and screened at the International Green Film Festival in Seoul Korea and CineGlobe at CERN in Switzerland. Her scriptwriting has taken her to the Stowe Story Labs in Vermont, the Stowe Feature Talent campus, and earned awards at the Cinequest Film Festival and the All Write Now screenplay competition.
Sahra has worked with numerous artists and filmmakers including Miranda July, Scott Snibbe, and Gabrielle Demeestere. She has produced corporate videos for leading international companies including Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, and Unite Housing, as well as compelling documentaries for non-profit organizations including Children’s Hospital of Oakland, Council of Christians and Jews and the Holocaust Education Trust, taking her film camera to Nepal and Costa Rica. Working with professional actors, she created a series of catchy, fresh online training videos for Digital Training Videos. She is a skilled editor and has authored two patents on automatic video editing from her work at Hewlett Packard.
Sahra enjoys working with students of all ages, and has worked with community groups and has acted as a mentor to young filmmakers in Edinburgh and London. She has taught filmmaking at Santa Clara University, San Francisco State University, Stevenson College Edinburgh, and through Media Education and Screen Education Edinburgh. She is a tenured professor of film production at Diablo Valley College, a curriculum representative for the Regional Virtual Production Academy, and the Career Education lead for the Department of Film, Television, and Electronic Media.
She holds an M.F.A. in cinema from San Francisco State University, during which time she spent a year studying film at University of Paris (St Denis). She also has a B.S. from Stanford University, with a major in Earth Systems Science and a minor in Drama.