Director: Laura Poitras
Country: US/Yeman
Year: 2010
Length: 97 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Screening Times: Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 8 PM | Buy Tickets
Co-presented by the Toronto Palestine Film Festival
Synopsis
The second in Poitras’ trilogy on post-9/11 America (the first, My Country, My Country, was nominated for both an Independent Spirit and an Academy Award®), The Oath is a complex portrait of the interlinked lives of two men: Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, who was captured and detained at Guantanamo Bay; and his brother-in-law Abu Jandal, a former bin Laden bodyguard and Al Qaida recruiter, who was released by the US government after naming names in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Conducting a series of interviews with Jandal in Yemen (where he lives and works as a cab driver) and inter-cutting them with Hamdan’s letters to his family, Poitras creates a provocative and ambiguous combination of character study and political critique.
Festivals & Awards
Sundance Film Festival, USA 2010: EXCELLENCE IN CINEMATOGRAPHY AWARD
True/False Film Festival, USA 2010: TRUE VISION AWARD
Full Frame Film Festival, USA 2010: SPECIAL JURY AWARD
Hot Docs, Canada 2010: SPECIAL JURY PRIZE – INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
Edinburgh Film Festival, Scotland 2010: BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD
Sarasota Film Festival, USA 2010: BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD
Boston Independent Film Festival , USA 2010: BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD
Interviews & Reviews
Huffington Post — Film Review: The Oath
Film Critic — Review in Theaters: The Oath
New York Magazine — Critic’s Pick: The Oath
New York Times — Two Paths From Al Qaeda in the Post-9/11 World
NPR — A Different Man Emerges After An ‘Oath’ Of Jihad
NPR — Laura Poitras, Puzzling Over A Jihadi’s Journey
Variety — Reviews: The Oath
Director’s Bios
Laura Poitras was nominated for an Academy Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and an Emmy Award for My Country, My Country (2006), a documentary about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. My Country, My Country was co-produced with ITVS, released theatrically by Zeitgeist Films, and broadcast on P.O.V./PBS.
She received a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy and an Independent Spirit Award for Flag Wars (2003; made with Linda Goode Bryant), a documentary about gentrification that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and won the award for Best Documentary.
Following My Country, My Country, The Oath is Poitras’ second documentary in a trilogy titled The New American Century about America post 9/11. The final film will focus on the 9/11 trials.
Poitras is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation/Tribeca Film Institute. She has attended the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Storytelling and Edit Lab as both a Fellow and creative adviser. Her work has received support from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), P.O.V./American Documentary, Creative Capital, Sundance Documentary Film Program, Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, the Vital Projects Fund, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, Chicken and Egg Pictures, and others.
She is currently working on The Guantanamo Project, a multimedia project to collect documents and artifacts from Guantanamo Bay Prison. Before making documentaries, she worked as a professional chef. She lives in New York City.
External Links
Official Website
Download film trailer on iTunes
The Oath on IMDb