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Julia Bacha
Julia Bacha at the 72nd Annual Peabody Awards
Born	1980 (age 44–45) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation	Director, Producer, Writer
Nationality	Brazilian
Genre	Documentary
Notable works	Budrus, Encounter Point, Control Room
Spouse	Lucas Welch
Website
justvision.org/staff/julia-bacha

Julia Bacha (born 1980) is a Brazilian documentary filmmaker, media strategist, and award-winning filmmaker, whose work has been exhibited at Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Dubai International film festivals as well as broadcast on the BBC, HBO, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya television channels.

Background

Bacha was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Of her move to the United States and transition to filmmaking, Bacha states:

When I was 17 I came to the US to study Middle Eastern history and politics at Columbia University. History was always the subject that I loved the most and I felt it gave me the deepest sense of our humanity and who we are and where we’re going. When I came to Columbia and started taking classes with some of the Middle Eastern professors, it really opened a world for me that I hadn’t had the chance yet to experience. Then I got accepted to Tehran University to do my masters but the Iranian government wasn’t issuing visas to international students at the time. I was caught in a limbo because my visa to be in the US had expired and yet I couldn’t go to Iran. So I accepted an invitation by an Egyptian filmmaker to go to Cairo and work on this documentary called Control Room.

In 2003, she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the Columbia University School of General Studies.

Career

Bacha has strategically used film to highlight under documented stories from the Middle East.

In 2004, she was the co-writer (with director Jehane Noujaim) and editor of Control Room, a critically acclaimed documentary about Al Jazeera. Bacha was nominated to the Writers Guild of America Awards 2005 for her work on this film. Two years later, she co-directed (with Ronit Avni) the documentary Encounter Point, which was the official selection at Tribeca Film Festival, Hot Docs, Jerusalem Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival and San Francisco International Film Festivals, where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary. Bacha directed the 2009 documentary Budrus, which was shown at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival and became runner up in the festival's documentary competition. Budrus won over 18 international prizes, including the 2012 PUMA Creative.Impact Award, a prize given to the documentary film that had the greatest impact on society in any given year. Her two most recent films, "Home Front: Portraits From Sheikh Jarrah" (2011) and "My Neighbourhood" (2012) have received widespread acclaim internationally. In 2013, My Neighbourhood won the prestigious Peabody Award and premiered online at The Guardian. In 2014, My Neighbourhood won a Special Mention at the Social Impact Media Awards. On November 12, 2017, her latest film, Naila and the Uprising (2017), premiered at the DOC NYC filmfestival.

By 2006, Bacha had become creative director at Just Vision, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to foster conversations on divisive current issues.

In 2011, she gave a TED talk called "Pay Attention to Nonviolence," widely viewed worldwide. In 2016, she spoke to TED again on "How women wage conflict without violence."