--- name: "Naji Abu Nowar" canonical: "https://film.one/person/naji-abu-nowar" fi1m_id: "naji-abu-nowar" imdb_id: "nm3578681" tmdb_id: 1354686 wikidata_id: "Q20873378" roles: ["Director"] born: "1 January 1981" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "director" average_over: 1 updated: "2026-10-02T23:15:25.187790+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Naji Abu Nowar ## Identity Naji Abu Nowar - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/naji-abu-nowar - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** naji-abu-nowar - **IMDb ID:** nm3578681 - **TMDB ID:** 1354686 - **Wikidata ID:** Q20873378 - **Same entity:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naji_Abu_Nowar, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20873378, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3578681/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1354686 Director. Born 1 January 1981 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England UK. ## Details - **Work:** Director - **Born:** 1 January 1981, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England UK - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naji_Abu_Nowar, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20873378, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3578681/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1354686 ## Streaming the US now - **Amazon Prime Video:** [*Theeb*](https://film.one/film/theeb.md) (80) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Naji Abu Nowar > Naji Abu Nowar has made one feature, and it tells us what kind of director he is: patient, and inclined to put the camera at the height of the person everyone else is talking over. *Theeb* is a fine start. A British officer rides into a Bedouin camp in 1916 wanting a guide to a well on the old pilgrim road, and the film does not go with him. It goes with the boy who follows his brother. For the whole hundred minutes *Theeb* (2014) stays at that boy's height, so the adults' business, the officer's errand and the box he will not explain, reaches us only in pieces, as it reaches him. Abu Nowar and his co-writer Bassel Ghandour decline to fill in the gaps, and they are right to. We felt the dread arrive at the moment the child asks what is in the box and nobody answers; a question a boy cannot get answered is worse than any answer would have been. One feature is not a career, so most of what we can say about Naji Abu Nowar is about how that feature got made. He came to it slowly: a screenwriters' lab in Jordan in 2005, a short, *Death of a Boxer* (2009), then years of failing to raise the money. When it finally came together he spent a year living with a Bedouin community in southern Jordan, and the men and boys in the film are not professional actors but people from that community, trained over eight months. He has said, "If the tribesmen had felt it wasn't their culture, their storytelling, I would have considered it a total failure." Directors say this sort of thing; the difference here is that the film bears it out. The hospitality, the camp, the business of surviving out there play as life being lived, not as scenery for a European to ride through. He calls what he makes a Bedouin Western, and the description is fair. The shape is the Western's, the manners are the Bedouin's, and the obvious ancestor is *Lawrence of Arabia*, which he has had the nerve to turn round so that the Englishman passes through the frame and the people he was hired to look past are the ones we stay with. Wolfgang Thaler shot it on 16mm in Wadi Rum and Wadi Araba, and the grain does the desert a service: it looks like a place with weather and dirt rather than a view. The faults are the faults of a first film that trusts its material slightly too much. The middle dawdles, and the score sounds borrowed from a larger and more Western production than this one. Those are the better kind of faults to have. What comes next is the question, and the record since is thin: last we heard he was in Amman with projects in development, possibly a sequel, possibly something in English. The danger for a man who did one thing this well is being asked to do it again, bigger, with a star in the officer's saddle. The whole point of *Theeb* was that the officer was not the point. ## Biography Naji Abu Nowar is a British-Jordanian film director and writer. Born in Oxford in 1981, he studied war studies at King's College London. He began his filmmaking career after attending the 2005 RAWI Screenwriters Lab in association with the Sundance Institute. He wrote and directed the short film *Death of a Boxer* (2009), which screened at festivals including Palm Springs, Dubai and Miami. His feature debut *Theeb* (2014), which he wrote and directed, is a Bedouin Western set in 1916 Jordan. It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and won the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. Abu Nowar has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2016. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Theeb* (2014), Fi1m 80, Director, Writer — [page](https://film.one/film/theeb.md) ## Complete filmography (2) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Theeb* (2014), Director, Writer — Fi1m 80, [page](https://film.one/film/theeb.md) - *Death of a Boxer* (2009), Director, Writer, Producer --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/naji-abu-nowar