Omar Naim

“The Final Cut is about editing and memory” said the young director barely 27 at the time. Naim also stated that his Lebanese origins also influenced the film's plot. “It’s the Lebanese notion of mass memory, and people's very subjective memory and view of the world,” he explains. “This subsequently dictates how society functions. I extrapolated that into sci-fi theory”.

In 2004, Naim wrote and directed his first feature film, The Final Cut, which starred Academy Award winning actor and comedian Robin Williams, Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, and Jim Caviezel. Tak Fujimoto, of The Silence of the Lambs and The Sixth Sense fame, oversaw the cinematography. The film won the best screenplay award at the Deauville Film Festival and was an official selection of the Berlin Film Festival.

With the help of the Fares Foundation, Naim went on to study film at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. During his four-year education at Emerson, Naim created a number of short films, among which figures his 1999 thesis, a 28-minute documentary titled Grand Theater: A Tale of Beirut. In this work, Naim puts the spotlight on Beirut’s historic Grand Theater, which was torn in a violent no-man's land between two bellicose sides in the Lebanese civil war. The theater serves as a metaphorical illustration for Lebanon's tragic 15-year civil war. Through the eyes of the old theater, the different tales of actors, directors, soldiers and civilians are woven together at the Grand Theater. As war escalates in scale and absurdity, the lines between war and theater, as well as between show and reality, become blurred. The film earned Naim several awards at Emerson, an Honorable Mention, and played at a number of international festivals. Naim was also a finalist for the Student Oscar given by the AMPAS in 2000. Above all, and perhaps most importantly, this film earned the young director loaded hands-on experience he needed to be able to tackle his next giant project, which was still dormant at that time. “I learned everything making that film, from inception to print”, says Naim.

Omar Naim was born in Jordan to a Lebanese journalist father and the renowned Lebanese actress and playwright mother Nidal Al-Ashkar. Growing up surrounded by artists, musicians and writers, Naim had a childhood enriched with art and culture. His parents were both in theater and film. His mother, Nidal Al-Ashkar, the matriarch of Lebanese theater, is the founder of Masrah Al-Madina (The City Theater) where she was decorated by the French government in 1997 with a Knight Grade Decoration of Arts and Letters.

Omar Naim (Arabic: عمر نعيم ‎; born 27 September 1977) is a Lebanese film director and screenwriter best known for writing and directing the 2004 film The Final Cut.