Rafea: Solar Mama
TFI Suppport
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(2011 Spotlighting Women Documentary Award Grantee)
Rafea is a Bedouin woman who lives with her daughters in a village near the Jordan-Iraq border. She is given a chance to travel to India to attend the Barefoot College, where illiterate women from around the world are trained in six months to be solar engineers. If Rafea succeeds, she will be able to electrify her village, train more engineers, and provide for her daughters. But can she overcome all the obstacles that stand in her way?
Jehane Noujaim
Jehane Noujaim is a filmmaker and founder of Pangea Day - a four-hour live global broadcast that briefly united the world through the power of film. Noujaim was raised in Cairo, Egypt where she began her career as a photographer. Following a B.A. in Film and Philosophy at Harvard, she was awarded the Gardiner fellowship under which she directed Mokattam (1998). Noujaim went on to produce and direct Startup.com (2001) in association with Pennebaker Hegedus Films and Control Room (2004). She has worked in both in the U.S. and the Middle East. She was co-director on Egypt: We Are Watching You (2007), which premiered as one of the ten films in the "Why Democracy?" series focusing on contemporary democracy around the globe. Noujaim has also worked as a cinematographer on Born Rich (2003), Only the Strong Survive (2002), and Down from the Mountain (2002), and as executive producer on Encounter Point (2006) and Budrus (currently in release).
