Directors: Mark Nickolas, Racha Najdi Producer: Jean Ferreri
Description:
Female
graffiti artists in Egypt use their street art to participate in and
lead revolution. Nefertiti’s Daughters is a story of women,
art and revolution. Told by prominent Egyptian artists, this
documentary witnesses the critical role revolutionary street art
played during the Egyptian uprisings. Focused on the role of women
artists in the struggle for social and political change, Nefertiti's
Daughters spotlights how the iconic graffiti of Queen Nefertiti
places her on the front lines in the ongoing fight for women’s
rights and freedoms in Egypt today.
Biography: Mark
Nickolas is a long-time
veteran of US politics, most notably as an aide to then Vice
President Al Gore, and later managed federal and statewide campaigns,
before shifting his efforts to the political media world, and
eventually to filmmaking. His first film, My
Life in the Canyon of Heroes,
was named a short film finalist by Smithsonian magazine, and earned national media from The
Atlantic, and segments
on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” and CNBC’s “Power
Lunch.” His current film, Nefertiti’s
Daughter, a short
documentary on female revolutionary street artists in Egypt, won
Grand Jury First Prize at the Athens International Film and Video
Festival, a Gold Remi award at Worldfest-Houston and was privately
screened at a museum (E-werk)
in Germany. Mark is in post-production on a third short documentary
(Nth Country Project),
and is in pre-production on his first feature-length documentary
about a cautionary tale on the excesses of the “war on terror”
titled A Cloud of
Suspicion. Originally
from Oakland, California, Mark earned his BA from the University of
California at Berkeley, and his MA in media studies & film from
The New School in New York City.
Racha Najdi is a producer in the fields of cinema and music. Most recently, she
worked with Wika (Cairo) on the production and distribution of Nadine
Khan’s first feature film Harag
w Marag (Chaos
and Disorder, 2011)
which won the Grand Jury Selection Prize at the Dubai Film Festival.
In 2011-2012, she was manager of the Express Fund at the Arab Fund
for Arts and Culture, a competitive programme providing one-year of
funding to artists from the Arab World in support of projects
inspired by the Arab Spring. Najdi studied public relations and
advertising at the Lebanese University in Beirut and obtained a
masters in cultural management and international cooperation.
