Birth— 1952
Where—Lahore
Education—MFA, Concordia University

Bibliography

• • Passage to Lahore: A Novel(1995)
  • Radius Islamicus(2018)
  • Into the European Mirror: A Work by Julian Samuel(1997)
  • The Raft of the Medusa: Five Voices on Colonies, Nations and History(1993)

   

Documentaries

• The Raft of the Medusa: five voices on colonies nations and histories
• Into the European Mirror
• City of the Dead and the World Exhibitions
• Lettres du caire
• The Library in Crisis
• Save and Burn
• Atheism
• Beulah in Lahore and other places

Julian Samuel is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and a fine art painter. He was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1952 and has lived in the United Kingdom, Peterborough, ON, Montreal, and now Toronto.

His family emigrated to the UK and then to Canada. After graduating from Trent University with a degree in literature, he established himself in Montreal from 1982 onwards. Samuel was awarded an MFA from Concordia University, where he subsequently taught at the graduate level, focusing on aesthetics in documentary filmmaking.

He has produced and directed a number of films that examine the historical and contemporary relationship between the Western world, the Middle East and Asia set against larger subjects in contemporary society. Palestine’s struggle for self-determination is a recurring theme in his work. Notable films include Atheism (2006), Save and Burn (2004) and The Library in Crisis (2002).

Samuel has made a number of films that examine the historical and contemporary relationship between the West, the Middle East and Asia set against larger subjects in contemporary society. Palestine’s struggle for self-determination is a recurring theme in his work among other post-colonial themes.

He is the author of Radius Islamicus (2018), Passage to Lahore (1995) and Lone Ranger in Pakistan (1986). On the book jacket of Passage to Lahore, Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival, writes “the bravest piece of writing to emerge from our carefully confused Canada…(T)he book is unafraid of anger, unafraid of ideas and unafraid of speaking the wrong thing.”

Passage to Lahore received mixed reviews upon its French release in Quebec. The book contains criticism of the Quebec provincial government’s political agenda to preserve Quebecois culture resulting in a muting of minority representation in the arts.

He is a frequent contributor to Serai, a Montreal-based not-for-profit web magazine focused on arts, culture and politics.

Samuel is also an abstract expressionist painter.

He resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Passage to Lahore: A Novel
Julian Samuel
A self-defined Marxist Pakistani-British-Canadian Montrealer, Julian Samuel is an author, film-maker and video producer whose work explores real and imaginary borders, the clash of cultures and issues of identity in a post-colonial world. His episodic protest novel, Passage to Lahore, (Mercury Press, 1995), and his other writings needle and provoke the reader by their restless tone and subversive content. But in person (we met at a St. Denis St. café on a balmy day in early spring)