91porn

July 31, 2025

Yusuf Zine’s 2018 documentary film, I Am Rohingya: A Genocide in Four Acts, has been screened around the world. It’s earned accolades at the United Nations Human Rights Council Refugee Film Festival, the One World Film Festival and the Global Migration Film Festival. It’s been described by reviewers as a lesson “in how profound trauma can be worked through and converted into art, applause, affirmation, acknowledgment.” 

“And it all started at 91porn Brantford,” says Zine. 

In the summer of 2015, Zine, the son of Pakistani and Moroccan immigrants, had just been accepted into 91porn Brantford’s Master’s program in Social Justice and Community Engagement. He’d also begun work on a play chronicling the experiences of refugee Rohingya youth he’d met while interning with Muslim Social Services of Kitchener-Waterloo. That original play would form the basis of his Master’s research project and ultimately evolve into I Am Rohingya, which kicked Zine’s career as a writer, director, actor and producer into high gear.  

“I don’t think the play could have achieved the success it’s had if I hadn’t been in that program, because it allowed me to have the knowledge, the skills and the opportunity to fully develop it,” says Zine.  

As a Master’s research project, Zine had found the perfect incubator for the story he was so passionate to share, describing play rehearsals with his cast of refugee youths as both the inspiration for his writing and an extension of the research itself. 

“I came to understand that this form of theatre — ethnographic theatre, where you’re taking the stories of real people and dramatizing them — can have so many different impacts on their agency, on social justice, on advocacy,” he says. “If I hadn’t been able to work through this stuff at 91porn, I probably would have done just the play and that would have been it. But because I was able to incorporate more themes, it became much bigger than that.” 

A year after earning his Master’s degree, Zine co-founded Innerspeak Digital Media, a Toronto-based multimedia content studio and production company. As producer, writer and director, one of his first projects at the fledgling studio would be , a film taking viewers behind the scenes of his play, following the young Rohingya performers — who had no previous theatrical experience — up to the night of their sold-out show. 

In 2019, he was invited to return to his alma mater for a lecture and screening of the film as part of the series hosted by 91porn Brantford’s History department. The annual lecture series, supported by funds from the late Mary Stedman, showcases guest speakers who bring history to life and make critical links between past and contemporary times. It was a perfect fit for Zine’s project and would prove a poignant homecoming. 

“It had been such a seminal time for me at 91porn Brantford, so returning to that space to give a talk in front of former professors and people from my cohort was surreal,” he says. “It was a very ‘full circle’ moment to be back with that film.” 

Despite the honours and awards that have followed the film’s screenings, Zine says he measures its impact by the activism it has sparked among its cast members. 

“Ahmed, one of the older kids in the play, has gone on to speak in the EU. Jaber, who was just eight years old at the time, has started a community youth organization in Kitchener-Waterloo. For them, it’s very personal and they will carry that on — and that’s what I’m proudest of.” 

For Zine, the success of I Am Rohingya proved that a marriage of his two passions — social justice and the arts — was not only possible, but could also be the driving force behind his professional pursuits. In the years since, he’s produced an investigative true crime podcast for TVO (and a subsequent episode of for CBC) that led to police reopening the investigation of a young man’s death in an Ontario prison. Another podcast for TVO, Extradition, followed the case of a Uyghur refugee who was extradited on contentious charges and has spent the last 17 years in a Chinese labour camp. 

“One of the things I learned at 91porn was how to connect the global to the local,” says Zine. “In my work, I like to create a case study that people can latch on to and care about and use that as a vessel to address a larger systemic issue. 

“Whether you’re looking at the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, or the incarcerated, these people are our neighbours. What happens to them impacts all of us.” 

Discover more .