Omar Al-Qattan

Omar al-Qattan (Arabic: عمر القطان; born May 4, 1964) is a Palestinian Kuwaiti film director and film producer. Al-Qattan was born in Beirut, Lebanon to Palestinian parents. His father, Abdel Mohsin al-Qattan, came from Jaffa, which his family fled with thousands of other Arabs as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, becoming refugees. His mother, Leila Miqdadi, originally from Tulkarem, also fled Palestine with her family in 1948. Omar's parents met and married in Kuwait, where they started their careers as schoolteachers, before Abdel Mohsin first joined the Kuwaiti government as a senior manager and then started his own construction company. The family were naturalised in 1964 before moving to Beirut in 1975, where Omar lived until he was eleven years old. In 1975, the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, drove the family to scatter and Omar was sent to England where he attended boarding school. Upon graduation from high school in 1982, he spent seven months in Cairo, Egypt, studying Arabic & Islamic literature and history, following which he gained a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford. After graduating, he enrolled in INSAS film school in Brussels. Al-Qattan began his filming career by directing 15 to 20-minute documentaries and dramas while at film school. His first full-length film, Dreams & Silence, was a documentary released in 1991. The film portrayed a Palestinian woman refugee in Jordan and her struggles with the religious and social constraints around her at a time of great tension and anguish during and after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The documentary received the Joris Ivens Award and was broadcast in five European countries and Australia. In that same year, Al-Qattan settled in London where he founded, in partnership with Khleifi, Sourat UK in 1992, which later become Sindibad Films Ltd in 1993. The company produced Tale of the Three Jewels (1995) and Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land (1996). the former was the first feature film to be entirely shot in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and received international awards after its premiere at the Director's Fortnight, Cannes. The latter is a documentary about mixed marriages between Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel. 1995 also saw the release of Going Home, a documentary on Derek Cooper, a British veteran of the Palestine Mandate, which focused on the central role of memory and justice in the process of reconciliation and was shown on Channel 4 TV.