| Episode | 8 |
| Season | 1 |
| Category | People |
| Listen | Full Episode #8 ↗ |
Episode: 8 — "Turn Your Plan B Into Plan A" · Full Episode #8
Date: 2019
Language: English throughout
Abdulaziz Lamlum — known as Abd — is a British-Libyan director and editor. He grew up split between Cairo and London. Originally wanted to be an architect. Got into filmmaking through the Libyan revolution at age 16, where he helped rebel TV stations. Studied film in the UK. At the time of recording, he had just started his own production company.
Abd was in Cairo, ready to enrol in architecture school, when the university told him he was too young — come back next year. He refused to wait. The revolution had just happened. At 16, he had been embedded with rebel TV stations and felt the power of media firsthand. When his father — "Baba Ghali" — said "you can do film," the path unlocked. He moved to the UK and pursued film.
At 16, watching Libyan state TV, Abd thought the production quality was laughably bad — star dissolves, peaked audio, 1980s aesthetic in 2010. He mocked it to his mother. Later, when rebels raided Gaddafi's TV stations, they found state-of-the-art equipment. The low quality was deliberate — an attempt to freeze Libya culturally, aesthetically, and politically. Abd wrote his university dissertation on Gaddafi's propaganda regime.
See: Libyan Media and Propaganda
Abd wrote a letter to Buckingham Palace: "My name is Abdulaziz — if you're available, I'd love a cup of tea." Months later he received a reply on cream Buckingham Palace letterhead — second-class stamp — saying the Queen was unavailable. He noticed that before postal privatisation, the palace used first-class stamps. The whole thing delighted him.
See: Letter to the Queen
Abd and Tariq Elmeri built a Libyan content platform together — a Facebook page with short documentary-style video content, shot on a Red camera. It collapsed not because of bad content but because neither was getting paid for it, and real-world work demands ate the time. Lesson: should have focused on one repeatable format rather than ambitious multi-format output.
Abd explained Kuleshov's editing experiment: the same neutral shot of a man's face — cut to a baby reads as loving; cut to a coffin reads as sad; cut to a woman reads as creepy. Same face, same expression. Meaning comes entirely from juxtaposition. He connected this to how propaganda works.
"If you don't ask, you don't get. It's just as simple as that." (EP 8)
"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room." (EP 8)