We’ll spend a lot of Oscars night fawning over Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence, and maybe even Emma Thompson and Julia Roberts. And of course there’ll be lots of 12 Years-versus-Gravity chatter, and all the noise about who’s got the sexiest beard there. But, ahead of the big event, during the calm that is the storm that is Hollywood’s biggest event of the year, what we’d quite like to do is tell you a bit about the Oscar nominees you’ve never heard of.
Jehane Noujaim is the director of The Square, a feature-length documentary about a group of Egyptian revolutionaries from the frontline. Through this group of young people, Noujaim followed the ongoing revolution from its roots in protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square when everything kicked off in 2011.
The harrowing documentary has done incredibly well, with critics lauding it across the board, and it’s already won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary (bit of a mouthful, but you got there) at Sundance 2013.
Unlike so many of the Academy Award-nominated films that you hear everyone in America going on about before you get a chance to see, you can watch this one right now if you’ve got a Netflix account. We like how the website helpfully points out that ‘This film is: Inspiring”, but it’s also been described as intense, emotional, traumatic and gritty. You can see the trailer here (put a jumper on, you'll get goosebumps)
Noujaim’s background isn’t all gritty realism: born to an Egyptian father and American mother, she grew up in Kuwait and Cairo before her family moved to Boston in 1990, when she was 16. Attending Harvard University, she started off training to be a doctor. However, after she realised it wasn’t her ‘first love’, she took up the visual arts instead.
Making films about her roommate and used this experience to get a job at MTV. However, she worked in their documentary department before moving onto producing Startup.com, a film all about the internet bubble of 1999-2000 where everyone thought they could make a fast buck out of the internet. Critically acclaimed, her work on this documentary led to various other projects in both the US and the Middle East. A similar documentary to The Square is Control Room, all about how the 2003 invasion of Iraq was allowed to be covered across the world by US Central Command; so she’s not an entirely uncontroversial choice.
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.