Playback is providing a deep dive into the careers of our 2022 10 to Watch recipients. This year’s cohort were selected from 217 submissions and represent a wide array of film and TV talent as producers, writers, directors, and executives. Stay tuned for additional profiles over the next month.

As Abdul Malik tells it, his foray into screenwriting was “a very elliptical entry with a lot of false starts and a lot of mess … but it sort of happened.”

Indeed, it did. The Edmonton-based 29-year-old is on a prolific trajectory that his veteran peers find astounding, with a role as director of development at Fae Pictures, and credits including story editor on CTV’s Transplant and writer on the features Peace by Chocolate (2021) and the upcoming Queen Tut. He also has around eight projects that have been optioned and are in various stages of development at companies such as Shaftesbury, Alibi Entertainment and Circle Blue Entertainment.

“I’m eminently concerned with stories about liberation, about justice. I mean that in a very pure sense,” Malik tells Playback Daily. “I had a long journey towards rediscovering my faith; my own relationship with Islam is something I interrogate a lot. But I came from a very political family. I spent basically a decade working in politics, especially working in the cause of labour and labour rights, telling stories of working people. That is very crucial to my work, it’s very much informed my worldview.”

That worldview started in Toronto, where Malik grew up and went to film school at York University. He ended up dropping out and doing grip electric work, unsure of what to do with his life and feeling “really depressed and miserable,” he says. He discussed his situation with one of his cinematography professors, who told him: “Don’t rush. Just live a life worth talking about and eventually you’ll get there.”

Malik took that advice and got a job in Alberta covering the labour movement as a documentarian, driving from city to city and interviewing thousands of people. That led to a career in photojournalism as a storyteller and had him feeling like he finally had a story worth telling and an identity worth examining.

“I think those years away really gave me a sense of surety, allowed me to write without any pressure, just on my own time, meet people, learn about myself, my politics, the stories I want to tell,” he says. “Then a friend of a friend from film school messaged me one day saying, ‘I interviewed to write this movie. I didn’t get it, but they were asking if they knew a specific kind of writer. Do you write?’ And I said, ‘I do, mostly for myself in hotel rooms. But I’ll take the interview, why not?'”

That film was the award-winning Peace By Chocolate, which Malik co-wrote with Jonathan Keijser, who also directed. Malik admits he didn’t initially get the writing job on the story of young Syrian refugee adapting to small-town life. But he had a “gut feeling” and eventually landed it after calling back to pitch himself again, “which is something I will never, ever do again,” he says with a laugh.

“That was probably the bravest thing I ever did, and that led to people I knew from Toronto way back reaching out, like Shant [Joshi, president] at Fae pictures being like, ‘Do you want to come on board Fae, and do you have any projects we can option from you?'”

Malik then met producer Sonya Di Rienzo of Hawkeye Pictures, who connected him with his current agent, Jennifer Irons. “At a certain point, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a job now. I can quit my day job,” he says.

Malik recently optioned the rights to a series of detective novels by Ausma Zehanat Khan, which he says is now in development with Shaftesbury. He’s also developing a horror project at the Canadian Film Centre and a procedural script with director-writer-actor Cory Bowles for Morwyn Brebner and Andrew Ackman at Husk Media.

Meanwhile, production started last month on the Reem Morsi-directed Queen Tut, a queer immigration story of an Egyptian teenager discovering a new life in Toronto. It’s produced by Joshi and Lindsay Blair Goeldner of Fae Pictures, with Lauren Saarimaki as associate producer and Aeschylus Poulos and Di Rienzo of Hawkeye Pictures and Alexandra Billings executive producing. Kaveh Mohebbi and Bryan Mark are the other writers.

“It has been an absolute pleasure working with someone as devoted and talented as Abdul in developing some of our most treasured upcoming projects at Fae Pictures. He’s a real tour-de-force and I am so excited to see what’s to come,” says Joshi.

Bowles says he heard Malik’s name through peers and was approached by Irons about working with him. “I read this two-page pitch and I was absolutely floored,” says Bowles, whose directing credits include CBC’s Pretty Hard Cases and Diggstown. “I called up my agent and I was like, ‘This dude’s incredible. This is incredible. I just want to do something with him.'”

Bowles has a laundry list of glowing adjectives to describe Malik’s character — disciplined, dedicated, driven, humble and mature among them. His writing is unique, clear and “really smart, really thought out,” he adds, noting Malik works on a level and at a speed that Bowles is “baffled by” and finds inspiring.

“A lot of that comes from the fact that he put his ear to the ground early on,” says Bowles. “He’s very socially conscious. He’s been very involved in understanding levels of power and levels of institution and how that impacts certain peoples, whether it’s in a social class or a work class or an employment class, racial class or religious class.”

Perhaps one of Malik’s biggest strengths is his ability to write a wide range of stories, from drama and comedy, to genre and sci-fi, says Bowles.

Malik says his goals include helping other creatives get their projects developed through Fae while having a “an original pilot in every possible genre that someone could ask for.”

“It’s finding new ways to interrogate decades-old issues of justice, liberation and labour,” he says. “That sort of thing is very important to me and making sure that there’s a seed of that in everything I write — to not make it repetitive, but to find new angles on these things and new stories and new forms that can take.”