Public Information Office

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: January 26, 2006
CONTACT: Donna Myers, 206.546.4717

Different Channels, Different Truths
Documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim lectures
at Shoreline Community College -- March 1, 2006

Shoreline, WA — Egyptian American documentary film director, Jehane Noujaim will lecture at Shoreline Community College at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 1, 2006. Noujaim is best known for her films, Control Room and Startup.com. Her appearance is a part of the College’s 2005-06 Robert E. Colbert Lecture Series.

Noujaim began her career as a photographer and filmmaker in Cairo, Egypt, where she grew up. She moved to Boston in 1990, where she attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in visual arts and philosophy in 1996. Earlier that year, Noujaim was awarded the Gardiner Fellowship, under which she directed Mokattam, an Arabic film about an Egyptian garbage-collecting village. Noujaim's controversial documentary, Control Room, about the Arabic-language cable news station, Al Jazeera, called into question the prevailing images and positions offered up by the U.S. news media about the war in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times said Control Room offered a "glimpse of a world where everything is reversed, where our most cherished preconceptions are called into question and reality proves to be a more complex business than we imagined." The New York Times calls it "an indispensable example of the inquisitive, self-questioning democratic spirit."

Noujaim was a producer for the MTV News and Documentary Division and worked on the documentary series, Unfiltered. She left her producing job at MTV to produce and direct Startup.com in association with Pennebaker Hedgedus Films. The highly acclaimed documentary has won numerous awards including the DGA and IDA Awards for Best Documentary.

Noujaim has since worked in both the Middle East and the U.S. as a director and cinematographer on various documentaries including Born Rich (Jamie Johnson), Only The Strong Survive (D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus), and Down From The Mountain (D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus & Nick Doob).
General admission is $12, $10 for seniors and students, and $6 for children 14 and younger and SCC students with College ID. Purchase tickets at the door or call 206.546.4606 to order tickets.

Shoreline Community College is located at 16101 Greenwood Avenue North, just west of Aurora Avenue and north of Seattle city limits.

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