Firas Sameer is an Iraqi director, born in 1977 in Baghdad. He holds a number of international awards in the field of filmmaking from international festivals in America, Canada, India and others for a number of his artistic productions in the field of cinema. He started his artistic work for years and won awards before studying filmmaking and developing his skills with a personal effort.

Director Firas Sameer holds a university degree in Computer Engineering and Control from the Technology University in Baghdad 2002, where he worked in the field of engineering for nearly 14 years in international companies in various engineering fields, in communications and infrastructure projects implementation, despite his work these long years but at the same time he continued to work on his artistic skills. His desire did not start at the university stage, but in fact it started when he was in the pre-primary school period, when the teacher then expressed admiration for his ability to draw and paint at that young age when she wrote on his graduation certificate (he is good at drawing and loves to paint very much).

Painting was not the only thing that distinguished him at the time, but he was chosen to be a member of a children's singing troupe, where a number of kindergarten parties participated with them, as he possesses ability that enables him to sing properly without errors at his four years of age.

He fell in love with the cinema field when he was twelve years of age after watching a number of science fiction movies like Godzilla, Star wars, and Superman movies and he was wondering about the filming secrets of the movie making, for instance making the actor (in the role of Superman) to fly realistically in the movie. His other favorite hobby is reading and so he cared a lot about buying books about cinema tricks translated into Arabic, along with reading children's magazines, or international novels and stories. He was greatly supported by his parents who encouraged his hobbies, as well as watching documentary programs on TV that talk about the global film industry, which made him understand how cinematic tricks work or being implemented.

He participated in many art exhibitions during the elementary school period as a representative of his school "Saint Joseph" in Baghdad, where the school won first prize because of his paintings more than once competing against several schools. In the adolescence period he practiced the art of sculpting on wood and/or the clay and got praised by one of the professional sculptors.

When he graduated from the high school, he wanted to complete his art career and join the Institute of Fine Arts, but he faced a strong rejection from his parents, given that the society in which he grew up, including his extended family, was full of college graduates from the medical and engineering fields, including his sister the doctor and his brother the engineer, and that he must be either a doctor or an engineer. Accordingly he entered the field of engineering carrying the dreams of art with him, but he did not give up painting, sculpture or music and attempts to write poetry and even his interest in cinema during his university studies.

Even during his work in the field of engineering for many years he practiced his artistic hobbies. After the launch of the Internet, his field of interest changed from painting and other arts, to practicing Photoshop, video editing, and filmmaking programs, where those tools captured his great interest in all his spare time, and he even preferred it over many other hobbies or youth activities with friends or family.

His artistic career in film directing and editing began to develop after he left Iraq and lived in Dubai - United Arab Emirates since 2006 where the possibility of communication with different nationalities and buying books via the Internet. Due to the ease of networking and freedom of travel in Dubai, he communicated with institutions of cinema and he studied script writing, and practicing photography editing. He also had the opportunity to participate in acting in the movie Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise as an extra cast actor and benefited a lot from the experience in the field of directing dealing with the best filmmakers in the world from Hollywood and exploring the stages of filming the movie.

He managed to work in his spare time during his work in the field of engineering as a freelancer with a number of clients in the field of production to make professional montage of their work in video and audio, making cinematic tricks and graphics, coloring video scenes and other tasks until he ended up leaving the field of engineering in 2019 and officially established his company, Babylon Gate Films LLC, in 2018.