Isabelle is a BIFA-winning writer, director, producer and author whose work combines emotionally charged character storytelling with bold social themes, dark humour and genre. She is committed to creating female-centred work and giving voice to women’s stories that have too often been ignored.
Isabelle began her career in Los Angeles as a script reader and assistant at Paramount Studios. Across the twenty-year international career that followed, spanning fiction and documentary, she has developed and produced work with filmmakers from around the world.
She produced Son of Babylon, which won the Amnesty International Film Prize and Peace Film Award at the Berlinale, received the Raindance Award at the British Independent Film Awards, and was selected as Iraq’s official submission for the Academy Awards.
Her other credits include the feature documentary In My Mother’s Arms, which premiered at IDFA and screened at CPH; The Journey, which she co-wrote and produced and which was selected for Cinéfondation’s L’Atelier at the Cannes Film Festival before premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival and screening at the BFI London Film Festival; and Irkalla: Gilgamesh’s Dream, which premiered at Locarno and subsequently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Isabelle was selected by European Film Promotion as the UK’s EFP Producer on the Move at Cannes and is an alumna of Sundance and EAVE. She is also a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. Her projects have received support and recognition from organisations including the BFI, Sundance Institute, British Council and BBC Writersroom.
Her current writing and directing slate includes The Change, a feminist psychological body-horror exploring menopause, identity and survival; Bare, a darkly comic social thriller about motherhood, autonomy and online exploitation; and Bloody Women, a provocative television drama about female friendship, justice and collective rebellion.
Alongside her screen work, Isabelle is writing her memoir and developing a number of books that extend the same candid, female-centred voice onto the page.
Isabelle’s producing background gives her an unusual command of both story and execution, while her writing and directing are distinguished by emotional honesty, cinematic ambition and an instinct for finding humour in the darkest places. Based in Yorkshire, she works across feature film, television and publishing.
