Annemarie Jacir

Annemarie Jacir has been working in independent film since 1994 and has written, directed and produced a number of films, including "A Post Oslo History" (1998), "The Satellite Shooters" (2001) and "Like Twenty Impossibles" (2003). She has taught courses at Columbia, Bethlehem, and Birzeit University. She also works as a freelance editor and cinematographer. Salt of this Sea (2008) is her first feature film and her second work to debut at Cannes Film Festival. Having been banned from returning to Palestine, she now lives in Amman, Jordan.

Annemarie Jacir was named one of Filmmaker magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema in 2004. Her short film "Like Twenty Impossibles" was the first Palestinian short film to be an official selection of the Cannes International Film Festival (Cinefondation), went on to be a Student Academy Awards Finalist, and won over 15 awards at international festivals, including Best Film at the Palm Springs Short Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, Institute Du Monde Arabe Biennale, Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, and IFP/New York.



She received the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's (ADC) Jack Shaheen Scholarship Award. She has also received a Jerome Foundation Media Arts grant, a New York State Council on the Arts distribution grant, the Paul Robeson Fund, the Kathryn Parlan Screenwriting Award, and a Zaki Gordan Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. Her feature script Salt of this Sea was selected for the Hubert Bals Development Fund in Rotterdam, the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in Utah, and was a Sopadin finalist for the Grande Prix du Meilleur Scenariste.



Jacir co-founded Philistine Films, an independent production company, focusing on productions related to the Arab world and Iran. Jacir shot and produced the documentary Until When, an in-depth portrait of the lives of several families living in the Deheisha refugee camp as well as several other films. She collaborated with Algerian-French filmmaker Nassim Amouache on "Quelques Miettes Pour Les Oiseaux," a documentary sketch of the lives of a handful of men and women eking out a living in the Jordanian town of Ruwayshed, a small-time oil-smuggling entrepot that's the last stop on the road to Iraq (Official Selection, Venice International Film Festival; Best Film, Montpellier; Press Prize Clermont-Ferrand).



She is chief curator and co-founder of the groundbreaking Dreams of a Nation Palestinian cinema project, dedicated to the promotion of Palestinian cinema. In 2003, she organized and curated the largest traveling film festival in Palestine, which included the screening of archival Palestinian films from Revolution Cinema, screening for the first time on Palestinian soil. She has taught at Columbia University, Bethlehem University, and Birzeit University and in refugee camps in Palestine, Lebanon and currently in Jordan. She works as a freelance editor and cinematographer as well as film curator. Jacir is a board member of Alwan for the Arts, a cultural organization devoted to North African and Middle Eastern art. She has served as a jury member to the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival as well as Cinecolor Award, Argentina. She is a founding member of the Palestinian Filmmakers’ Collective, based in Palestine.