Jehane Noujaim

TV Real Weekly, April 30, 2008

Documentary Filmmaker

Creator, Pangea Day

On May 10, cities around the world, including London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, will be linked in a four-hour global broadcast for Pangea Day. Featuring films, speakers—among them Christiane Amanpour and Queen Noor of Jordan—and music from Bob Geldof, Dave Stewart, Gilberto Gil and others, the event aims to use the medium of short film to help people overcome differences based on geographic borders, race or religion.

Pangea Day is the brainchild of Jehane Noujaim, the award-winning filmmaker behind Control Room, the acclaimed feature documentary that chronicled life inside the Qatar-based Arabic news channel Al Jazeera in 2003, in the early days of the war in Iraq. After premiering at Sundance, Control Room quickly generated headlines across the U.S. and around the world for providing an inside look at a network that had, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, been dubbed as the mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden.

It was Noujaim’s work on Control Room that caught the attention of TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design), an annual convention for leading thinkers and innovators in those three areas. Each year, TED awards $100,000 each to three individuals to fulfill “One Wish to Change the World.”

In 2006, Noujaim was named one of the TED Prize winners—joining a group that also includes Bill Clinton and Bono, among others. “As a filmmaker, my challenge was, How do you use film to make a difference in the world?” Noujaim says.

The films to be aired for Pangea Day were selected from submissions from around the world, responding to Noujaim’s question: “If you had the world’s attention for five minutes, what story would you tell? Give us films that surprise and entertain. Tell a story that someone on the other side of the world could relate to. If you feel misunderstood in some way, try to really have us see the world through your eyes.”

The call for short films generated 2,500 submissions from more than 100 countries, helped along in part by Nokia, which donated cameras and camera-enabled phones to send out to film schools and aspiring filmmakers across the globe. “The challenge for us is: how do you find films that really reach to our humanity and emotions and are about subjects that people on different sides of the world can understand? It’s bearing witness to people’s stories, you see their jokes, their vulnerabilities and their secrets. The minute a person from anywhere in the world feels like their truth has power and meaning and is relevant, I think they begin to feel differently about themselves and their place in the world. It’s really important right now that somebody in a Third World country is recognized and celebrated for their humor and their intelligence rather than what’s shown on the news. These stories shape people’s imagination about what is possible and what the future could be. Media holds the promise of allowing us to share these diverse stories to a far wider audience, a worldwide audience. I think that we have an obligation to try to use the technology for good and that’s why I thought this wish was the right one to make to the leading thinkers in technology [at TED].”

To ensure the widest reach for the event, Pangea Day organizers have been busy lining up partners around the world. The event will be accessible via a host of platforms, including a live stream on www.pangeaday.org; on TV via STAR World in Asia, BSkyB in the U.K., OnceTV in Mexico, TVNZ in New Zealand, Current TV and V-me in the U.S. and Globosat in Brazil, among others; on mobile phones and in a selection of digital cinemas across the U.S.

For Noujaim, Pangea Day continues a process that began with her work on Control Room, which she embarked on because of her interest in Al Jazeera and how it was being received outside of the Middle East. An Egyptian American who spent much of her childhood in Cairo, Noujaim was struck by how the coverage of the Iraq war on Al Jazeera differed so much with that on the U.S. news networks. “There was no access for the American public to what people were actually thinking on the other side of the world.”

Noujaim headed off to Qatar—home base of Al Jazeera and the U.S. military’s Central Command—on a shoestring budget, no equipment, “and I didn’t get access until I got there. Basically, I just knocked on doors. I bought a camera and created the sound equipment. I had a friend who came to help me and we pretty much made our system, made [an audio] boom pole out of an old broom stick!”

Returning to the U.S. to finish editing the film, Noujaim was hesitant about how it would be received by Americans, particularly because it contained graphic news coverage from Al Jazeera of victims of the war. She was pleasantly surprised by its strong festival circuit response and, in particular, by the dialogue the film started at screenings across the country. “I really saw this as a way to get people to talk about issues.”

That trait runs through Noujaim’s career. She spent her teen years taking photographs in the streets of Cairo, and after college began working at MTV where, for a project called Unfiltered, “we sent out cameras to kids around the U.S. to tell their stories. There was one kid who had HIV and was gay and we showed his story and we got thousands of letters from people saying it was amazing to see somebody who was going through the things they had been going through.”

Her move into the feature documentary world came through Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, whom she worked with on Startup.com, a behind-the-scenes look at the dotcom boom. That experience confirmed for Noujaim that she wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. “It’s an incredible opportunity to drop into worlds that you would never ordinarily get to experience,” she says.

While she has some projects in the works, for the time being Noujaim is focused on pulling Pangea Day off without a hitch. “It’s hard work pulling continents together,” she says with a laugh. She is also exploring how to maintain the momentum of the event. “We have a whole team working on what is going to happen after the day, how people are going to be connected. The hope is that it becomes about worldwide collaboration. I think this is a humble step in a long process that aims to move towards a place where we are helping to replace complacency and fear about the other with a curiosity and excitement about the other. That’s what I hope for on May 11—for people to walk away feeling that.”

—By Mansha Daswani