Alik Shahadah is a multi-award winning recipient including the rare UNESCO award for film.

He defines his mission as "demolishing the race-based privileges, which are byproducts of mental and physical slavery." He is focused on economic empowerment and sees cultural ownership and agency as central to the mission of his generation. His business approach is rooted in efficiency and resource management; "in defining success, we must define failure. In defining a destination means defining a route, in defining a product means defining a process." He is best known for authoring works, which deal with African history, social justice, economic issues, education and world peace. Shadadah states that: Knowledge, is limited by the information received; diminished or enhanced by the conditioning of the mind which processes the information. And therefore belives the African mind must be conditioned by new paradigms.

He produces work that articulates a multidimensional African world perspective. Testimony to this is 500 Years Later and his new production Motherland. He is author of arabslavetrade.com, a leading website on the Arab slave trade in Africa. He advocates the commuting of linguistic terms such as "Black people", "Black African", "Sub-Saharan Africa" due to their nature of creating a disservice and detracting African people from their historical value and geo-political reality.

If the enemy has guns and you have spears – You have a chance. If they have nukes and you have rocks–You still have a chance. However, if they have unity and you have disunity–there is no hope!   'Alik Shahadah

Shahadah is of a new generation of African Diaspora filmmakers who see media image and control as weapons of a new progressive generation. Shahadah studied Aeronautical Engineering (BEng) in London . He spent his teenage years growing up in Brooklyn New York. His former father-in-law was socialist St Lucian politician George Odlum.

Politically Shahadah adheres to a meritocracy egalitarian philosophy of harmonious coexistence through intellectual debate. He is an advocate of Garvey's race first ideology and Garveys economic philosophies But like Garvey does not advocate any form of race supremacy. Race first is a political and economic necessity to restore plurality and agency. He believes humanity is best served by respecting cultural diversity and opposes imperialism and neo-liberal globalisation, which seeks to reduce a multi-cultural world to a Western oriented monoculture. 'Alik Shahadah is a Muslim in the vein of Malcolm X and the West African Islamic tradition. While being a strong advocate for women’s rights he opposes feminism on the bases that it is a destructive ideology against family, loaded with liberal Eurocentric values.

Regardless of how hard an argument is made, the final voice, in a world of inequity, lies with the man with the biggest stick, even if he has the softest voice   'Alik Shahadah

Shahadah believes that Africans must develop an authentic African aesthetic and bring this into film culture. He also stresses that all art in the traditional African senses is socially functional. As a filmmaker he is noted for emphasizing music to film synchronization.

He stresses that African film, like African music (both of the continent and the Diaspora), has a rhythm which is the fundamental inner harmony that sets up a unique African sensibility. His documentaries never use narration and are driven my music, strong visuals set to music and rich color. Unique to documentary films, Shahadah uses heavy dramatic film scores, typical of epic movies. He says his films are a four part harmony of information produced by images, music, text and dialog. For the Motherland (film) Sona Jobarteh and Alik Shahadah claims he created a new way of mixing music in Dolby 5.1 called split positioning.