Personal details
Born:
- Born Place: New York, New York, U.S.A.
Also Known As:
Лотфи Натан
Lotfy Nathan
Lotfy Nathan is an American filmmaker, born in New York in 1987, who is of British-American and Coptic Egyptian background. He initially focused on painting, graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2009, but film became his primary focus, with his background in painting informing his work. He was accepted into the Columbia University MFA Film Program. Nathan's debut feature was the 2013 documentary 12 O'Clock Boys, about a group of dirt bikers in Baltimore, for which he received an HBO emerging artist award. The documentary had a theatrical release in North America and Europe and played at numerous festivals including SXSW and Hot Docs Toronto. In 2022, he debuted his first scripted feature, Harka, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival and was inspired by the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose act of self-immolation sparked the Tunisian Revolution. Nathan wrote and directed the 2025 supernatural thriller The Carpenter's Son, which is inspired by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas and draws on his own Coptic Christian faith background to explore the human and divine aspects of Jesus Christ.
