The 2014 Academy Award nominations were announced this week and two highly popular Middle Eastern films have made the cut. Egyptian activist documentary "The Square" made the final cut for this year's top documentary, while Palestinian feature "Omar" also received a nod for Best Foreign Language Film.
Director of "Omar" Hany Abu-Assad, who received his second nomination after "Paradise Now" in 2005, said he believes the entire experience is a positive one and helps to shed light on international areas that often fail to deliver on the big screen.
The other international contenders are The Broken Circle Breakdown from Belgium, Denmark's The Hunt, and Cambodia's The Missing Picture.
"It is an example of the kind of attention for a film from a certain area to bring further attention to the rest of the area it belongs to. Like Iran in recent years where people did not know much about the Iranian cinema or the narrative of their people but by giving them international attention," Abu-Assad said.
"Of course it ends up being a positive effect."
While the Palestinian Twittersphere boasted confidence in their second nomination ever, the Egyptian activist film that traces that country's revolution from January 2011 to the present "The Square" brought much of the international community out to praise the Academy's decision of including the Egyptian uprising into its history.
For documentary film director Jehane Noujaim, the content of the film, she hopes, will help bring more admiration for what the Egyptian people have done from the early days of Tahrir Square, or "The Square."
"We wanted to choose a place that we knew would reach the widest and most diverse audience, and because of the relatively low cost of Netflix, we felt this was the place where the film would be viewed most widely," Noujaim said of why they chose Egypt's iconic location for their film.
Both films will have to wait until March 2 to learn if they will be bringing home gold.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
