On November 8, 2016, a young, hijab-wearing mother-of-three named Ilhan Omar made history, becoming the first Somali Muslim woman to be elected to state office in America. She was hailed by the New York Times as, “one of the bright lights in the post-election darkness,” and the documentary film “TIME FOR ILHAN” intimately chronicles her hard-fought campaign for State Representative in Minnesota’s Senate District 60B, home to the nation’s largest Somali community. A fresh take on the old story of the American Dream, TIME FOR ILHAN offers an inspiring, stereotype-busting portrait of a rising political star as she begins a bold and powerful political career.
Award winning Minneapolis filmmaker NORAH SHAPIRO left a decade-long career as a public defender to work as a documentary filmmaker, and hasn’t looked back since. Her latest film, Time for Ilhan about the rise of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (the nation’s 1st Somali-American legislator) premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, and premiered internationally at the 2018 Hot Docs Film Festival in its Silence Breakers spotlight and Docs for Schools program. Time for Ilhan has won multiple awards including HBO Best Feature Documentary Audience Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival, and Best U.S. Feature Documentary at the 2018 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Recently, Norah received How Women Lead’s 2019 Changing the Narrative award. The film, still on the festival circuit, launches its impact tour in March, 2019. Norah’s first feature documentary Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile (2014) premiered at the 2014 DOC NYC Film Festival, and screened widely at festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad. She is currently producing a documentary about the far-reaching impact of a notorious abduction of a young boy in rural Minnesota, and is also developing a project about a young woman’s quest to create the nation’s 1st Memorial to survivors of sexual violence.
