PLU presents Jehane Noujaim, director of Oscar-nominated "The Square"
Film screening 5 p.m., lecture 7:30 p.m. Feb. 19, 2015
TACOMA, WA (Jan. 20, 2015)—Pacific Lutheran University presents Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Square, lecturing on An Eyewitness Account of the Egyptian Revolution and the Downfall of a Regime, as the speaker for PLU's second biennial Ambassador Chris Stevens Memorial Lecture.
Noujaim will spend the afternoon of Thursday, Feb. 19, on the PLU campus, meeting with students and visiting classes. At 5 p.m., PLU will hold a free public screening of The Square in the Karen Hille Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, followed by a free public lecture by Noujaim at 7:30 p.m., all part of PLU’s Spring Spotlight Series, “…and Justice for All?”
The Square follows the uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that inspired Egypt and the world. In addition to its Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, the film won the Directors Guild Award and the International Documentary Award and became the first film to win the Audience Award at both Sundance and the Toronto Film Festival.
Director/producer Noujaim has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Charlie Rose, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and Meet the Press. She also was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the WEF in 2007 and named one of the “50 People Who Will Change the World” by Wired (2012), “125 Women of Impact” by Newsweek (2013) and “100 Most Creative People in the World” by Fast Company (2014).
Before graduating Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, she was awarded the Gardiner Fellowship for Mokattam, an Arabic film she directed about a garbage-collecting village near Cairo. Noujaim then joined the MTV News and Documentary Division as a segment producer for the documentary series Unfiltered. She left that position to produce and direct the feature documentary StartUp.com, which won the DGA and IDA awards for best documentary. Noujaim continued to work on numerous documentaries as a cinematographer, including Born Rich, Only the Strong Survive and Down from the Mountain, before directing Control Room, her next feature, in 2004. With Control Room, a documentary that exposes the difference in media coverage between the Arab and the Western world during the United States’ war with Iraq, she became the first woman and the youngest recipient of the coveted TED Prize in 2006. She also worked on Rafea, Solar Mama (2013), which was filmed in India and Jordan and follows women who leave their villages to be trained for six months in India as solar engineers before returning to solar-power their communities.
Noujaim continues to work in the U.S. and in the Middle East as an executive producer for such films as Encounter Point and Budrus, which premiered as one of the 10 films in the Why Democracy series that focused on contemporary democracy around the globe.
EVENT DETAILS
What: Screening of The Square and lecture by filmmaker Jehane Noujaim.
When: 5 p.m. screening; 7:30 p.m. lecture. Thursday, Feb. 19.
Where: Karen Hille Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, PLU campus.
Admission: Free and open to the public.
More information: Click here.
About the Ambassador Chris Stevens Memorial Lecture
The Ambassador Chris Stevens Memorial Lecture celebrates the life of an extraordinary public servant and former Peace Corps volunteer killed on Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya. Supporting PLU’s vision for global education of “educating to achieve a just, healthy, sustainable and peaceful world,” the lecture seeks to build knowledge in the PLU community about the people of the Middle East, North Africa and the United States and creative pathways to peace in the region. The event is made possible by PLU’s Wang Center for Global Education, PLU’s Office of the Provost and the generous funding from the Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs.