Bora Kim '11, Sameh Zoabi '05 and Professor Dan Kleinman Win at Seattle International Film Festival

The 45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival featured two films by alumni and faculty this year, Bora Kim '11 for House of Hummingbird and Sameh Zoabi '05 and Professor Dan Kleinman for Tel Aviv on Fire. The festival took place from May 16-June 9, 2019, showcasing more than 400 films from nearly 90 countries to 140,000+ attendees.

Bora Kim’s House of Hummingbird won the Grand Jury Prize. The film has now won major awards at every festival it has been in, including Busan, Berlin, Beijing, Istanbul, Tribeca, Seattle. House of Hummingbird has been compared to the film Eighth Grade, if based in South Korea. In the film, reticent 14-year-old Eun-hee struggles with social pressure, her nascent sexuality, and her indifferent family during the summer of 1994 (equally tumultuous for her country), until a sympathetic teacher helps her navigate it all.

Tel Aviv on Fire won the Audience Award for Best Film. In the United States, Tel Aviv on Fire has been in three film festivals: Seattle, Minneapolis, and Sarasota. It won the audience award at all three. The film has been described as a wry, insightful comedy in which a production intern on a popular Palestinian telenovela makes nice with an Israeli checkpoint commander, who happens to have his own ideas for improving the show.

South Korean film director Bora Kim is a Columbia MFA graduate. Her short film The Recorder Exam received a Woodstock Jury Award for Best Student Short as well as the Director's Guild of America's Best Woman Student Film Award. As screenings were met with positive audience reaction, certain viewers inquired about the continued life of protagonist Eun-Hee, which inspired Kim's first feature, House of Hummingbird.

Sameh Zoabi was born in 1975 in Iskal, a Palestinian village near the city of Nazareth. He graduated from Tel Aviv University with a dual degree in Film Studies and English Literature before earning a Fulbright Fellowship to earn his MFA in Filmmaking from Columbia University in 2005. With films like Tel Aviv On Fire, Zoabi seeks to invoke humor in difficult narratives, stating, "We talk about Palestine being a place that is very hard, but I always remember people laughing all the time." In addition to filmmaking, Zoabi is an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Hunter College, and Columbia University's MFA program, teaching courses in direction, production, and screenwriting.

Dan Kleinman taught for twenty years as a member of the full-time screenwriting faculty at Columbia (1996-2016). During that time, he was chair of Film for five years and acting dean of the School of the Arts for three years. Prior to coming to Columbia, he taught for twenty years at NYU. He has been a mentor at the Sundance screenwriting lab in Utah and at screenwriting labs in Belgium and Uganda. He was a visiting faculty member at RITS in Brussels and at La Femis in Paris. His first produced screenplay was Rage (Warner Brothers) in 1972. His most recent film, Tel Aviv on Fire, had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. The film has won Best Film and Best Screenplay at the Haifa Film Festival, Grand Prize and Critics' Prize at the International Festival of Comedy Films, the François Chalais Prize for screenwriting at the RCC Festival in Cannes, Grand Prize at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz Festival, and the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Asian Screenplay of 2018.