Hassan Akkad

Hassan Akkad is a documentary filmmaker and an activist living in London. He fled Syria in 2012 and after a punishing three-month journey across Europe, he arrived in London. Akkad co-directed Convergence a Netflix documentary paying tribute to the unsung heroes of the pandemic and was part of the team that made Exodus: Our Journey to Europe which won the BAFTA for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2017. He worked in film and TV production and for Choose Love, a refugee advocacy organization, until the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when he took a job as an NHS hospital cleaner at Whipps Cross Hospital in East London. He documented the pandemic through photographs of his colleagues posted on social media. His posts went viral and he has since been featured in Vogue, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, BBC News and the Independent. Hope Not Fear is his first book.