I Was Looking for My Father… Without Realising It!

After three years of continuous work in television—as a producer, reporter and presenter—I thought I had reached what I had aspired to.

But something inside me was not satisfied.

I grew up in a home where media and art were a profession… not a job. My father, the pioneering director Saad Al-Furaih, believed that creativity is not practised through talent alone; it is refined by knowledge, culture, experience and reading, as well as love and passion.

Whenever I entered the television building, I walked through the corridors he had known for forty years. And whenever I saw his office, which had witnessed the finest years of his work, I would stop and contemplate.

Many years later… I realised something I had not been conscious of then.

I was looking for him!

I was breathing in the place where he had lived and, without realising it, trying in my subconscious to keep his name present… as though I feared that oblivion might swallow it.

But I also discovered that love alone does not make a profession, and passion alone is not enough.

I had to begin again.

I made a decision that surprised everyone.

I left my job in television, sold my car and decided to travel to Britain… the country where my father had spent seven years of his life, and whose depth of culture, thought and literature he had always spoken to me about.

The decision was not easy.

The procedures were exhausting, the step was fraught with risk, and everyone around me kept saying:

“You’re leaving your job to study?!”

But I believed that some journeys do not begin when you board the plane…

They begin when you find the courage to leave a life everyone else sees as safe… for a life you believe is worth living.