Luton burns victim aims for film industry career after graduation

Just six months after she was born Shamiam Arif suffered 70% burns to her face, hands and body when a candle fell into her cot at her family’s home in Kashmir.

The now 22-year-old, who lives in Luton, has just graduated with a degree in film production and is aiming for a career “doing what I love the most”.

“My mum screamed but the room was already in flames.”

Shamiam recalls of the night that changed the course of her life, shortly after she was born in Kotli in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

“My dad grabbed me and ran out of the house while everyone else was putting buckets of water on the fire.”

She was not expected to survive.

Her parents took her to the local hospital, but it did not have the ability to deal with severe burns.

“They said I was untreatable. They kept bandaging me up and then unbandaging it,” Shamiam says.

“We were sent five hours away to another hospital, but the damage was already done.”

However, her extended family in Luton started raising awareness of Shamiam’s story in the UK, and enough money was raised, with the support of the Muslim Hands charity, to bring her to the Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, which has a specialist burns unit.

Doctors rebuilt her skull, face and arms, but she continues to have to wear a helmet.

“The first procedure was my head. It was going from bad to worse, so they had to take half my skull away… I’ll have to wear this protective helmet for the rest of my life,” she says.

Shamiam lost both her hands in the fire, so doctors carried out the Krukenberg procedure which split her forearms to produce two “fingers” on each limb.

“It’s made a huge difference. I can pick things up, I can write, I can take pictures and use a phone. It gave me independence. I actually declined a bionic hand because I didn’t want it to be robotic,” she says.

Shamiam has also undergone numerous skin grafts to rebuild her face, including working on her eyelids.

“They did an operation so I could blink. My nose was burnt off so they did that. My mouth was all gone. They used skin from my back and legs to fix everything up,” she says.

Having attended Challney High School for Girls in Luton, Shamiam has recently graduated from the University of Hertfordshire with a 2:1 BA in film production.

“At school I was a very independent girl, so if I was going to do something I would do it by myself. I wouldn’t ask for help until I really needed it,” she says.

“I will now ask team-mates for help so I can still do what I want to do. In my last project I was the lighting operator and I want to work as a director.

“Right now I’m looking into anything in the industry that can jump-start my career, like being a film-set runner, volunteering or my own projects.

“This industry is hard to get into but with the experience it will help… to make a better person to get hired more and more. Alongside my job-finding I will be working on my photography skills and making it fun – I need hold a camera one way or another.

“I really don’t know my plan for the future, but I know that I will be in a TV studio doing what I love the most.

“It feels so surreal and like a dream come true, but with the support of family and friends anything can happen really.”

Getting emotional, her mother Tahira says: “I can’t believe that she’s grown up… and that she’s alive. She really struggled, but now she’s OK.”

Shamiam is also now raising money with the Kashmir Orphan Relief Trust to try to help build a specialist burns facility near the DHQ Kotli Hospital.

“I want to raise funds so that what happened to me won’t happen to others.

“My incident was extreme. Back then we didn’t any equipment or knowledge that could help, but this hospital is going to change people’s lives,” she says.