Karim Amer is a producer and director who makes complicated systems approachable through individual lives. We value his ability to get close to the people involved, but The Great Hack also shows how his conclusions can outrun his evidence.
Fi1m perspective
In The Great Hack (2019), Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim make personal data seem worth worrying about. They follow the Cambridge Analytica scandal, making the collection of personal information comprehensible without treating it as a specialist concern. We were unsettled by the account of lost privacy, because the film makes clear why apparently trivial information is worth collecting. This is Amer's useful habit as a filmmaker: approaching complicated systems through the people involved. We recommend this particular introduction with reservations about how confidently it describes what the data can achieve.
His early producing work includes a co-producer credit on Rafea: Solar Mama (2012) and producing The Square (2013), which follows activists in Tahrir Square. The shift towards technology in The Great Hack retains that interest in individual accounts of larger events. The later film began as a project about the Sony Pictures hack before developing into an examination of Cambridge Analytica. Following a changing story is part of his method, and Noujaim's frequent collaboration makes it unwise to treat the resulting films as Amer's work alone.
For The Great Hack, Cambridge Analytica materials arrived late in production, evidence of the access Amer and his collaborators could secure. The difficulty comes when the film moves from explaining the collection of data to assessing its power to persuade. Here the filmmakers' confidence runs ahead of the evidence they present, leaving the extent of that power insufficiently established. We want a clearer indication of what they can prove before being asked to accept their conclusions.
Subsequent directing and producing work includes The Vow (2020), about the NXIVM organisation, and Flight/Risk (2022), about Boeing whistleblowers. These subjects suit his recurring habit of using individual accounts to explain how organisations operate. His executive producing work includes the animated The Breadwinner (2017), while he produced Dina Amer's narrative feature You Resemble Me (2021). That is a broader slate than the investigative work alone suggests, though a producing credit cannot tell us which decisions were his. Start with The Great Hack for a clear introduction to data harvesting, and keep its claims about persuasion under scrutiny.
Biography
Karim Amer is an Egyptian-American film producer and director. Born on 10 November 1983 in Egypt, he studied at New York University.
He produced The Square (2013), the first Egyptian film nominated for an Academy Award. He directed, wrote and produced the Netflix documentary The Great Hack (2019) with Jehane Noujaim, which premiered at Sundance and received BAFTA and Emmy nominations.
Amer has also served as executive producer on The Breadwinner (2017) and produced You Resemble Me (2021) and All That's Left of You (2025). He is married to filmmaker Jehane Noujaim.
