Ian Iqbal Rashid is gracefully enduring the Saturday crowds and resultant chair jostling at a Thames-view café amid the utter mayhem of London’s Southbank. With a blend of polite modesty and self-congratulation, he deconstructs his ascent from starving poet to biscotti-nibbling film director, ticking off his accolades (jury prizes at film festivals, bidding wars at Sundance, a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award) with some wonderment, as if marvelling at how easy it all was. His acclaimed poetry begat writing work for British television, which begat two short films, which begat a feature, A Touch of Pink (described by one critic as “My Beautiful Laundrette in a world without Thatcher”). This month, Rashid’s reputation continues its climb with his latest feature film, out January 25, called How She Move.

Wait. Ian who? you ask. And rightly so. Rashid may be an industry player in the U.K., but word hasn’t quite made it back home. And anyway, there’s no straightforward answer. He was born Iqbal Rashid to South Asian Muslims in Tanzania in 1964; immigrated at age five with his parents (his dad is a bank manager, his mom an executive assistant) to Fleming­don Park; changed his name to Ian when his first-grade teacher deemed Iqbal unpronounceable; and relocated to London in 1991, where he met and moved in with his Australian boyfriend (now his husband).

To know Rashid, you have to know his oeuvre. His 1992 book of poetry, Black Markets, White Boyfriends (and Other Acts of Elision), was, in many ways, his coming out. His 1998 short film Surviving Sabu features a gay Indian filmmaker confronting his conservative father. In A Touch of Pink, a gay London-based South Asian Canadian hides his relationship from his mother when she comes to town. It started as a short story, which his partner—daunted by the prospect of supporting a starving poet—submitted to the BBC. The story was so intimately Rashid’s that when the script was optioned, the producers asked him to direct. “I turned them down at first,” he says, “but then I thought, If anyone’s going to ruin this film, I want it to be me.” In Rashid’s world, art has always imitated life. His life. Until he made a movie about a black girl on the competitive step-dancing circuit.

In How She Move, a ghetto-girl-made-good is forced to leave her suburban private school when her parents have to bail out—and ultimately bury—her junkie sister with the last of their savings. To earn her way back into school, she joins a troupe of underground dancers called the Jane Street Junta. (Hamilton stood in for Jane and Finch.) The movie was produced by the same team as A Touch of Pink. When the script, by ’Da Kink in My Hair’s Annmarie Morais, needed fine-tuning, Rashid was summoned to tweak and, eventually, direct. Drugs and hip hop at Jane and Finch may seem a world away from our boy in London, but he reckons that the film—his first directorial outing not based on his own material—is still Rashid-esque. “In a strange way, it didn’t appear right for me, but it made sense,” he says. “Flemingdon Park also has a huge Jamaican community, and the story is universal—it’s about an immigrant community, and, boy, do I get that.” Making a genre film, Rashid had to cast dancers who didn’t act and actors who didn’t dance, eventually discovering Juilliard grad Rutina Wesley, the female lead, at an open casting call. “It was her first movie, but you’d never know it,” says Rashid. “She was my way into the story; she became my eyes and ears. She’s like me, with more courage—she’s the me I would have liked to have been.”