Naji Abu Nowar

In February 2015, Abu Nowar was among the honorees who were invited by King Abdullah and Queen Rania to Al Husseiniya Palace, for an event in which the attendees were praised for their entrepreneurship and good citizenship.

The film, released in 2014, received widespread acclaim and recognition for its success. Abu Nowar dedicated the film to artist and architect Ali Maher, an iconic figure in Jordan. Maher, who offered support to Abu Nowar when he first arrived in Jordan in 2004, died in 2013 and only got to see the movie's trailer.

In 2009, Abu Nowar wrote and directed Death of a Boxer, an eight-minute film that appeared at The Palm Springs International Shortest, The Dubai International Film Festival, the Miami Short Film Festival, and the Franco-Arab Film Festival.

In 2005, Abu Nowar was accepted into the RAWI Screenwriters lab, a project sponsored by the Royal Film Commission and the Sundance Institute to support film makers. With this support, he developed his first screenplay Shakoush" (Hammer).

Abu Nowar returned to Amman in 2004, where he took up residence.

Following the success of Death of a Boxer, Abu Nowar had difficulty launching his next project, due to funding issues and ideas that were not strong enough to come to fruition. He had co-written a Bedouin western with Rupert Lloyd in 2003, but it was not until he met producer and screen-writer Bassel Ghandour that the idea for Theeb came together. The two decided to adapt a screenplay, written by Ghandour, into a full-length feature film.

Naji Abu Nowar (Arabic: ناجي أبو نوار ‎; born 1981) is a British-Jordanian film director, writer and producer. Best known for his works Death of a Boxer (2009), Till Death (2012) and Theeb (2014) for which he received wide spread acclaim and recognition, including a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at 88th Academy Awards, nomination for Best film not in the English language, and the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer at the 69th British Academy Film Awards. Theeb is the first Jordanian film to receive an Oscar nomination.

Abu Nowar was born in Oxford in 1981, from a Jordanian military family. He is the youngest of thirteen half-siblings. As a child, he heard stories from his father about chivalrous and courageous Bedouin warriors, which later influenced his film making. In an interview with The Times' Kate Maltby, he said: "I’ve always had a sympathy for people caught between different pressures."