Tawfik Abu Wael

Tawfik Abu Wael was born in 1976 in Umm al-Fahm

Tawfik Abu Wael was born in 1976 in Umm al-Fahm. He studied at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. From 1996 to 1998 he worked in the university's film archive, and later he taught drama at the Hassan Arafeh school in Jaffa.

He made several short and documentary films, among them Bread, Hashish and the Moon in 1997 and Waiting for Salah al-Din in 2001. His first feature, Atash, is an Arabic-language film about an isolated Arab family. It premiered at Cannes, where it won the critics' prize, and it later won the Ophir Award for cinematography.

In 2007 he received a grant to develop his film Tanathur, about a relationship between a woman and a man. The film came out in 2011 and competed at the Locarno festival.

In 2019 HBO aired Our Boys, a series he created with Hagai Levi and Joseph Cedar about the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. He directed and co-created Alumim, aired on Kan 11 from 2021, and in 2025 the series Fireflies, which he created with Shahar Magen and directed, premiered on Hot. He won the Israeli Television Academy Award for 2021.