Film, Animation & Creative Director in Dubai
Ahmed Khattab is an award-winning film director, animation director and creative director based in Dubai. He directs live-action and animated films, leads animation from 2D through 3D, and sets the creative vision behind cultural and brand work across the UAE.
Three roles, one director
Dubai is where Ahmed lives and works, and where his three roles meet. As Creative Director at MassHouse Studio since 2017 and Executive Producer at Flint Culture since 2023, he sets the vision for a project, then directs it himself, whether the finished piece is live action, hand-drawn, or fully built in 3D. That range is why clients bring him in early, before the format is even decided.
His UAE work includes projects connected to the Ministry of Education, alongside global brands such as adidas, BMW and Mars. Being based in the city also means a project gets a director inside the same time zone as the client, with Dubai's crews, vendors and post-production facilities close at hand.
The work behind the range
Children of Barzagh, the handcrafted 2D short he wrote and directed, is the clearest single example of his authored side, distributed by Watermelon Pictures and streaming on Watermelon+. On the other end of the scale sits the Islamic Anthology Series, a ten-episode 3D anthology made for the Saudi Heritage Commission, where he held both the Creative Director and Series Director roles across the full run.
Between those two sits Regional Museums, a film for Our Saudi Story that blends live action with hand-drawn animation, an example of creative direction and directing meeting on the same project. His festival record, 16 laurels including wins at the Red Sea International Film Festival and the Oscar-qualifying Alexandria International Film Festival, sits behind all three. Read more about how a UAE commission runs from concept to delivery in Working with a Film and Animation Director in the UAE.