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WONDER WOMAN Tanya Marar reveals how she smashed through the glass ceiling
get into filmmaking?’ To which I thought: ‘No way. How do I even start?’” Marar turned down the opportunity, but a seed had been planted. A few years later, she decided the advertising world and an office job wasn’t for her, so she set off to find work with a film crew. “I was extremely nervous since I had no idea how to go about it, and telling my family that I was giving up a secure office job was like telling them I was running off to join the circus. In some ways, let’s face it, I was.”
TANYA MARAR HAS a rather different backstory to most film crew. As a female born and raised in Amman, the zeitgeist of the eighties and nineties meant that filmmaking couldn’t have been a more unlikely career path for a young Jordanian. “Sure, we got all the latest Home Alone and Indiana Jones films on VHS ( The Last Crusade is set in Petra, Jordan), but we never thought about who was actually making them, or the number of different people, talents and departments it actually takes to produce something like that,”
she explains. “They just existed magically on a screen.” It wasn’t until Marar reached her mid-twenties, after studying politics and economics and then working at an advertising agency for a few years, did she come across how things were actually made; on a commercial shoot in Malaysia. “The Lebanese director of the shoot noticed me lurking around, probably not doing the job I was supposed to be doing, and turned to me to say: ‘You seem interested in this process, why don’t you
DRAMAS TO DOCUMENTARIES Marar has worked all across the globe on various projects, and in some of the most inhospitable places
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