Zineb OUKACH Fan Club: US Oscar to Arab Woman?

Thursday, November 8, 2007

US Oscar to Arab Woman?

Recently received this post to the site, I think it warrants it's own discussion. . . . "Great actress ! She's been able to make her character one of the most impressive in the film. I bet she'll become a star very fast. Hope americans will be smart enough to nominate her for oscars. What a great sign also for US to give an oscar to an arab woman !!! Thats the kind of things hollywood could be proud of !". . . . What do you think? Are her acting skills worthy of an Oscar? Could the US give an Oscar to an Arab woman?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...: I am from the US---she was good, but the movie didn't do as well, right? Maybe if the movie had done better there would be a chance.; November 12, 2007 at 2:31 PM
Anonymous said...: How well the show did is irrelivant. Look at Lions for Lambs. In that show the cast are all top performers and still the movie is a dog. Looking at Zina's performance in the film, she did a tremendous job portraying the life of an Arab youth.; November 13, 2007 at 8:39 AM
Anonymous said...: Très bonne performance d'actrice, je te souhaites un grand avenir dans cette voie. Il n'y a pas de défaut à corriger ... impeccable !

Tu t'es super bien sortie de la contrainte de parler en arabe litéraire ce qui n'est pas négligeable vu le niveau à Lyautey ! vraiment impressionnant :)

bref ! bon boulot même si le film avait quelques imperfections qui m'ont assez rapidement fait décrocher.

Bonne chance !=); January 22, 2008 at 1:47 PM
Enrique said...: Hi, I am from Bolivia
I was really surprised with the apparition of such a Beautiful girl on the screen.
For me Zineb Oukach will be one of the top actress in Hollywood very soon. She is so different of what we have everyday on tv or cinema, I really liked her a lot and hope watch to her in another good movie, as "Rendition " was.
She worked very well, and she is so lovely with her figure and smile.; May 3, 2008 at 9:16 AM
Anonymous said...: The movie is really good.this is the point, if you (Anonymous) don't want to believe what you watch..
Human wants to believe how he thinks and how he wants to look.

And also she is on the way. She was wonderful.; November 2, 2008 at 12:27 PM
Anonymous said...: zineb was fantastic in rendition! people can be critical of the film for whatever reason- IT DOES NOT MATTER!!! people of the US need to see this film, maybe it will help to get their heads out of their asses!!! i am an ex-pat now living in argentina. i left the states because of the patriot act and the horrible foreign policy of the states. FORGET HOLLYWOOD ZINEB, ITS FULL OF VAMPIRES!!!! you are too beautiful for that sludge pit.; August 18, 2009 at 12:42 PM
Anonymous said...: Well I definitely think she's very beautiful and has an original beauty only a Moroccan woman has :)
But I wish she will soon be given more roles in US films so we can really see her skills, and hopefully it won't be something stereotypical 'Arab' ...But knowing the Hollywood factory it might be a while.
The film 'Rendition' didn't really give her such a big chance to shine really, but at least she got some face time. Her character in the movie wasn't really that well developed and I don't know about you guys but even though I love Zineb I didn't really feel a connection with 'Fatima" and that is usually the writers' fault...Had they researched, built and included some more basis on who she was, we could feel that connection. Basically her character was very formulaic, and a little artificial but what can we expect from a big studio shooting in 'North Africa' (it was Morocco) and having all the Arab characters in this one country speak 6 different Arabid dialects!! lol. It was kinda funny, sometimes it was Egyptian, sometimes it didn't even sound like Arabic, then it was classical... What the?
Do your research Hollywood, or hire me to do it for you!!
Anyway, she's great, hopefully she can play another strong character again with a lead role this time!
Keep going Zineb!; September 9, 2009 at 10:57 PM

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Zineb OUKACH Upcoming News

Rendition
Director : Gavin Hood (Oscar 2006 Best film in foreign language for “Tsotsi”).
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal (Oscar 2006 Best Main Man Role), Reese Witherspoon ( Oscar 2006 Best …), Meryl Streep (3 Oscars), Zineb Oukach
Production: Anonymous Content, New Line, Level 1 Entertainment (U.S.A), Dune Films (Maroc).
Distribution: Metropolitan
First presented: Toronto Film Festival, September 2007
World Première : October 2007

SYNOPSIS
Anwar (Metwally) is an Egyptian-born scientist who lives in Chicago with his pregnant wife Isabella (Witherspoon) and their young son (Knight). On the way home from a Cape Town conference, he's grabbed by US agents and, on the orders of a senator (Streep), ferreted to North Africa, where he's the centre of an investigation into a local suicide bomb. Douglas (Gyllenhaal) is the rookie CIA operative there, observing the questioning and torture administered by the local security chief (Naor). Meanwhile, Isabella calls in a favour from a friend (Sarsgaard) who works in Washington and can get some answers.
Despite a fairly simplistic script, Hood develops an intriguing tone, opening with a bewildering number of characters and subplots, including a pivotal young couple (Oukach and Khouas) dealing with love, extremism and emotive family issues. But as the film progresses, each character emerges in strong relief as part of a single narrative. The details of their lives and the events they face, however contrived they may seem, come straight from the news headlines, as do the shadowy workings behind the scenes. (…) Hood addresses the situation with raw honesty and gritty emotion.
(review by Rich Cline – Shadow on the line)

Zineb OUKACH Biography

Born in the early eighties in Morocco, Zineb Oukach grew up in Casablanca, the so mythic city of North Africa that gave her name to the famous Bogart-Bergman movie. Maybe an early sign of her destiny…
She was very young fascinated by cinema. She had a visceral hungry for seeing as many movies she could, in a country and time where movies where rare, due to heavy censorship of the Hassan II reign, poor local TV programs and absence of satellite. One of her uncles, a cinema lover, made this birthing passion a little bit easier by letting her watch his heteroclite collection of tape recorded movies. She was spending almost all her free time watching these films, from famous Hollywood blockbusters to old European movies.
Her childhood was also a mix of different emotions and cultures, which contributed to build her sensibility. From Moroccan parents, she was educated in French schools. This made her learn both cultures, Arabic and religious through her parents, and French and atheist through her school. To a certain extent, she was however also lost between these 2 very different cultures, not knowing which were her true roots nor even mother language. Also politics were part of her childhood, with parents very concerned and defending all sorts of injustices in the world and had a certain admiration for famous French advocate Jacques Vergès, always defending lost causes. Zineb thinks today that if she had not become an actress, she would have been dreaming to be an advocate or a grand reporter.
As of the age of 16, she started to work as a photo model in Morocco, for magazines and advertising. Probably the only way for her in that time in Morocco to be in front of a camera. This enabled her to also know her first experience as an actress, for a TV commercial. Her passion started to become a reality, but although she was more and more dreaming of becoming a professional actress, she felt it too far away to truly believe in it.
More realistically, she starts a degree in economics in Morocco, and leaves the country after this at the age of 22 to study in France (Nancy) to obtain a Master degree in Marketing and Communications. But more and more, month after month, she realized that her life was not in business but in cinema. After just a year in Nancy, she decides to take the risk of her passion and go in Paris, to learn acting.
Zineb becomes a student at Eva Saint Paul Theater School and then at the famous Cours Florent, recommended by a few friends she starts to get in the acting field. But she realizes that the system didn’t fit her needs and personality. She follows in parallel a few sessions with Jack Waltzer, from Actors Studio, where she learns the American method, which she felt much closer to, and very different from all her learnings so far.
In September 2006, one of her teacher of Cours Florent calls her to go to a casting for an American movie. Without really believing but with all hope of her heart, she goes there and meets Gavin Hood, who immediately hires her for the role of Fatema in Rendition, together with famous and Oscar winning actors Streep, Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon.
This was just the beginning of a dream come true, for a passionate and sensible cinema lover.
Zineb hopes her performance in Rendition and her beginning visibility will give her the opportunity to be seen and selected by the best directors, be it in Hollywood or more engaged cinema style that fits her complex personality of modern and multicultural Arab woman. Very understandable with her multicultural origin, Zineb feels indeed both a modern occidental woman, and an Arab woman from an emerging country. She feels very close to all Arab women in the world and is passionate about defending their rights to more and more freedom in Muslim countries. In a sense, she is the Muslim woman of tomorrow. Or maybe even more, with her many cultures, just like world-music, a real “world-woman”.