رسانه‌ها

Barat Ali Batoor is a photographer, filmmaker and community advocate. Born in Quetta in 1983 to Hazara parents who had fled Afghanistan, he returned after 2001 and began photographing in 2002, working in Bamyan and Kabul and publishing in The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. His 2012 series The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan brought death threats, and he fled through Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, photographing a boat voyage that ended in shipwreck off Java. Resettled in Australia in 2013, he won the inaugural Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year and the Photographic Essay award that year. His work has been exhibited at State Library Victoria, the Western Australian Museum and the University of South Australia. He co-directs My Refugee Journey with Kasimir Burgess, coordinates the Refugee Leadership Program at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, and is founder and president of the Hazara Cultural Association in Dandenong.

Barat Ali Batoor is a photographer, filmmaker and advocate based in Melbourne, Australia. He was born in Quetta, Pakistan, in 1983, to Hazara parents who had fled Afghanistan. He returned after 2001 and began photographing in 2002, working in Bamyan and Kabul. His first solo exhibition, of daily life in Bamyan, opened in 2007, and his photographs have since been shown in Denmark, Dubai, Pakistan, Italy, Japan and Switzerland. He has been published in The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Stern, India Today, The Global Mail, The Daily Mail and The West Australian.

In 2009 a Documentary Photography Project grant from the Open Society Institute supported The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. Its publication in 2012 brought death threats, and he left through Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, photographing a boat voyage that ended in shipwreck off Java. Resettled in Australia in 2013, he won the inaugural Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year that year for Hazara exodus, the first day at sea, and the Nikon-Walkley Photographic Essay award for the same series. His TEDxSydney talk of 2014, My desperate journey with a human smuggler, has been played more than a million times on TED.com.

His exhibitions include Afghanistan: Photography by Barat Ali Batoor at the Western Australian Museum, Perth (2014 to 2015), Journey of Resilience at the Kerry Packer Civic Gallery, University of South Australia (2024), and Searching for Sanctuary: A journey of survival at State Library Victoria, which opened as part of RISING 2024, ran until January 2025 with more than 170 photographs and the footage he shot on the boat, and was highly commended at the 2026 Victorian Museums and Galleries Awards.

His first documentary, Batoor: A Refugee Journey (2021), won Best Director, Australia, at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. In Focus screened in the IEFTA Refugee Voices in Film programme at the Marché du Film, Cannes, in 2024, was selected for the AIDC FACTory pitching showcase and won the dokleipzig Prize at AIDC in 2025. It has grown into My Refugee Journey, an 85-minute feature documentary he co-directs with Kasimir Burgess, produced by Sally Ingleton of 360 Degree Films and financed with support from VicScreen and the Melbourne International Film Festival Premiere Fund. Completion is scheduled for March 2027.

He coordinates the Refugee Leadership Program at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and is founder and president of the Hazara Cultural Association in Dandenong. He speaks English, Hazaragi and Dari.