A Primer on Kashif Pasta (me!)

Welcome to KashifPasta.com. Thanks you so much for caring even a little bit and clicking through to here. I really do appreciate it!

First things first, yes - Pasta is my real last name. Yup.

I’m a 19 year-old Muslim film-maker and media producer from Surrey, British Columbia, a city of about 400,000 people in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada. I founded my own media production company, mkpmedia, in 2005, which I’ve run ever since.  We aim to be a one-stop storytelling firm for everything from blogs to feature films to podcasts to marketing, but for now are focused on video content for the web as well as web design itself. I also co-founded and ran a school-district wide film festival for high school students for three years until I graduated, called Montage.

I’ve loved film for as long as I can remember, started making simple little videos around age 8, and my first digitally shot + edited video at age 13. Since then I’ve done a bunch of shorts and ads, including the award-winning 48 hour film competition project Open Door, and the most recent, Jinx.

Right now, other than being a Communications student at Simon Fraser University, I do 4 main things:

1. An audio podcast  called ‘Keeping in Touch’, where my friend Ben Wright and I talk for 30-40 minutes a week in an entertaining fashion, throw a great song in the middle, and call it a day. It’s good stuff, you should listen and subscribe! 
2. And I’m on the board of directors of the Transformative Communities Project Society, a non profit that aims to promote personal growth, community building, leadership development and community-initiated social change through creative expression and heart-centered learning rooted in principles of social justice.
3. I also facilitate various workshops,  and am currently in the middle of a 10-week series for TCPS in which we’re creating discussions and a mural around disenfranchisement in Surrey.
4. And a super-secret awesome project that I hope I can reveal by December this year. :D

If you’re interested in working together, you can contact me by email - kashif at mkpmedia.net, or on twitter at twitter.com/kashifpasta.

For more general information about me, here’s a Podcast that I was interviewed on in 2007 that explains a lot about myself. It’s kind of outdated now but the principles remain the same

And if you’d like to commission me for any media production work, let me know here!

1st Draft Script for Surrey Urban Youth Project PSA video

“O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.” -Surah Al-Hujurât, Verse 13 -Al Qur’an

In a free and multicultural society such as ours,

where the government can not mandate our actions,

It is easy to forget our responsibility to learn

to acquire knowledge of our histories

our cultures,

of each other.

We are often led to believe that our differences are merely physical

That those of different skin colours, or nationalities are really all the same,

when we are not.

There is a difference between equality

and being the same.

We each have unique and rich backgrounds

that can add to each other,

yet we somehow manage to find someone, anyone, to discriminate against.

An inkling of something we don’t understand,

and we act out, in fear of being changed ourselves.

Wiping out populations of natives.

Enslaving free black people.

Taxing chinese immigrants.

Angrily conducting race riots.

Sending the japanese to internment camps.

Attacking the muslims verbally and physically.

we stand by, knowing it will pass as it usually does,

assuming some other group will be next

and that that too will pass.

without stopping to consider prevention

without educating ourselves on our differences

and celebrating them

and learning from them

and realizing that by not taking up our responsibility to learn

we defeat the purpose of freedom

and dishonour those that fought for it

We ignore that we are made in to nations and tribes for a reason;

so that we may know one another.