Even though the city of Nazareth features eminently in Christian history, the majority of its inhabitants in the present time are Muslim, while most of the land is owned by Christian institutions, a situation that has led to tension in the city’s day expansion. Set against the background of the riots surrounding a square that both Christians and Muslims lay claim to, director Hany Abu-Assad centers his film on two attendants of a gas service station who have been working there for decades, in the neighborhood where he spent his childhood. Nazareth 2000 is a caustic, insightful and witty portrait of a city embattled with the bankruptcy of politics and a demagoguery that invokes religious mythologies.

Hany Abu-Assad was born in Nazareth, Palestine in 1961. After having worked as an airplane engineer in The Netherlands for several years, Abu-Assad made the radical shift towards film, and produced the feature film Curfew, directed by Rashid Masharawi, in 1994. In 1998 he directed his first feature, The Fourteenth Chick, based on a script by writer Arnon Grunberg, followed by the documentary Nazareth 2000 (2000), next was his second feature Rana's Wedding (2002) and his second documentary Ford Transit (2002). In 2006, his nexy feature, Paradise Now, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film in that year. In 2011 Abu-Assad finished working on The Courier, a Hollywood movie starring Jeffery Dean Morgan, Til Schweiger and Mickey Rourke, and in 2013 he finished working on Omar, that won the Jury Prize in the competition of Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (OSCARS) for Best Foreign Language Film 2014 and won the Best Film at the Dubai Film Festival. In 2015 Abu-Assad completed his 6^th feature film The Idol a drama inspired by the incredible journey of the artist Mohammad Assaf, a singer from Gaza who won the Arab Idol show in 2013.