THERE IS NO LIGHT at the end of the tunnel, ” Masoud Al-Ali, a veteran Emirati film critic and documentary filmmaker, is reported to have said a little over a decade ago when asked about the prospects of the United Arab Emirates developing its own film industry.
What he did not know then was that not only would he bear witness to the turnaround he had dreamed of and wished for, but also play a pivotal role in scripting the future of filmmaking in the UAE.
On 22 April, the UAE’s first homegrown film, City of Life, directed by Ali F Mostafa, released in theatres countrywide. The silver-haired Al-Ali, now the artistic director of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), was the first to present Mostafa’s film at the sixth DIFF last December.
City of Life has been in theatres for more than a month now. Despite a limited release across 12 screens, it has collected more than 50,000 ticket stubs. It has largely been praised for its true-to-life depiction of Dubai and for steering clear of obvious PR gimmickry and brazen propaganda. The multilingual film—Arabic, English and Hindi—was scripted, produced and directed by Mostafa, who admits it was a challenge to complete it in a society conscious of its image.
“Dubai has a [certain] image around the world and wants to maintain that image, so they want to know if you’re trying to bring it down,” says Mostafa. “Anything you do in a place that’s not used to film is sensitive. At the end of the day, a film is a personal opinion. It doesn’t reflect or generalise on a complete country or community.”
AN URBAN DRAMA that follows several parallel narratives, City of Life is reminiscent of Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004), set in Los Angeles. Mostafa’s Dubai film follows events in the lives of an Indian taxi driver who is regularly mistaken for a Bollywood icon, an eastern European air hostess and her British advertising executive boyfriend who have a difficult relationship, and a pair of Emirati youths who speed through the city in pursuit of fights. For most Dubai residents, who are cocooned in societies made up of their own ethnic people, Mostafa’s camera provides an unprecedented peek into the lives of others.
“Through cinema, we meet, we see how we are different and how we are similar,” says Al-Ali.
Despite the absence of a serious industry, the region’s film history can be traced back to the late 1950s. Individuals such as Bahrain’s Khalifa Shaheen and Bassam Al-Thawadi, Kuwait’s Khaled Al-Siddiq, Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah Al-Mohaisen and the UAE’s Ali Al-Abdul, experimented with the medium using the limited resources at their disposal.
The cinema movement in the region received a huge boost when Dubai launched its international film festival in 2004. Not only did the festival bring international cinema to local audiences, it programmed a separate section for Gulf filmmakers and built on the success of the smaller Emirates Film Competition, set up by Al-Ali in 2002, which had already encouraged the region’s directors. The ‘build and they will come’ philosophy made popular by the Emirate’s real estate industry was adapted to cinema, as ‘screen and they will create.’ The mantra appears to have worked.
“When Dubai launched its international film festival, sceptics questioned the wisdom of hosting a film festival in a city that has no cinema industry. A film festival is an important platform for local talent and it contributes towards developing the local industry,” Al-Ali said on the eve of the world premiere of City of Life.
Since the inaugural edition in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha have followed and launched their own high-profile international film festivals. These festivals have exposed their citizens and residents to uncensored cinema from around the world—otherwise not available in local cinemas.
They have also kindled an interest in filmmaking and media among the Gulf region’s youth. Academic programmes dedicated to audiovisual studies, filmmaking, media and communication are sought after within the local universities and franchises of foreign institutes, such as the New York Film Academy and SAE (School of Audio Engineering).
As of 2009, more than 70 Emirati filmmakers were producing about 70 short films each year. However, presenting them at an international level, albeit on home turf, was proving to be a daunting task, as the region’s international festivals had to accommodate films from all over the world, limiting the space afforded to home-grown filmmakers.
Also churning out movies were the emerging filmmakers from the region, but where would they screen? More importantly, who would watch them?
To address the issue of providing an audience, Dubai’s international film festival launched the Gulf Film Festival (GFF). As the name suggests, it is a regional event strictly for Arab filmmakers from the Gulf, with Al-Ali at the helm.
In its third edition this year, GFF, which also includes a students’ competition, screened 194 films of which 112 were from the Gulf region. Eighty-two films comprised cinema presentations from countries such as Bulgaria, France, Russia, Canada and India. The foreign film selection bypasses popular fare and media regulars in favour of lesser-known filmmakers, with a view to diversify audience tastes. “We had more than 300 submissions,” says Al-Ali adding that the surge in the quantity of films produced was steadily translating into a higher rate of quality cinema.
Most of these films were shorts and documentaries. Of the 38 shorts in competition, Saudi Arabia was the most strongly represented nation, with 13 films, followed by the UAE with eight. Iraq dominated the documentary competition, with six of the nine films probing the country’s turbulent post-war landscape.
Intimate in its organisation and easily accessible to residents by way of free admission, GFF has proved to be an interesting snapshot of societal changes taking place. Students, especially, are unafraid of venturing into taboo territory.
The buzz around City of Life notwithstanding, the most talked about films at this year’s festival were the shorts: Shhh, a 40-minute fictional tale of four Emirati girlfriends and the complexities surrounding their relationships, andMan on the Edge, an abstract Saudi short film about one man’s sexual self-gratification.
Despite the toned-down and covered-up treatment in Shhh, the suggestive narrative that an Emirati girl could indulge in a Carrie Bradshaw-esque Sex and the City lifestyle was hotly discussed with the two female directors, Hafsa Al Mutawa and Shamma Abu Nawas, during the Q&A following the packed screening. The film won a Special Mention award at the festival.
UNLIKE THEIR ARAB COUNTERPARTS from the Levant and North Africa, whose films often touch on sociopolitical themes with conflicts as a backdrop or reference, the Gulf’s filmmakers are mostly apolitical in their content and are increasingly enjoying the benefits of film funds that are established to encourage storytelling. However, most of the financial opportunities available to Gulf filmmakers pit them against other Arab directors, as festival submissions are open to the large pool of filmmakers from the Arab world and of Arab origin. Funds exclusive to local filmmakers are limited in number, and are open only to the countries’ citizens and exclude the large expatriate population.
Nayla Al-Khaja, a female Emirati director, who has tackled controversial topics such as child abuse and adultery, said at a recent forum of filmmakers that the future of the industry depended on federal policy. “More important than the awards are the film funds and grants for local filmmakers, not just Emiratis, but anyone who lives here. We need good quality productions that will put our films on an international stage and we need to be turning them out regularly.” Al-Khaja’s film Bored won this year’s GFF script competition for Emirati filmmakers.
Over the three editions of GFF, it is already apparent that the content and genres are becoming harder to predict. After sharing their own community’s stories and fables, the Gulf region’s filmmakers are venturing out of their comfort zone to explore the penurious worker experience, as done by Kuwait’s Laila Marafie in her short film, 1 Babo, 1 Madeer, where an unfortunate Indian tea-boy describes his days working for a Kuwaiti manager, or the smorgasbord of expatriate lives presented by Mostafa in his now famous debut feature.
City of Life is no celluloid classic, but in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Mostafa is a trailblazer for future Emirati and Gulf filmmakers in how he arranged the film’s finance through a clever combination of fundraising and product placement, and battled censorship. He is now part of a sacred filmmaker trinity that includes Nayla Al-Khaja and Nawaf Al-Janahi, whose feature film The Circle was about gang violence. Al Janahi’s next directorial project, Sea Shadow, is one of the six Emirati films that will be developed, financed and produced by Abu Dhabi’s Imagenation, a film venture with a billion-dollar fund. He starts shooting later this year.
These filmmakers are optimistic about the direction the country and region’s cinema industry is headed. Initiatives by authorities such as the Abu Dhabi Film Commission, Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Dubai International Film Festival, Doha Tribeca Film Festival and Gulf Film Festival take into account the need to nurture every step of the filmmaking cycle. From script competitions that reward winners with development grants (Abu Dhabi’s 100,000-dollar screenwriting Shasha Grant), to co-production markets (Dubai Film Connection’s awards of more than 100,000 dollars), development and post-production funds (Abu Dhabi’s 500,000-dollar Sanad grants), festival competitions and Doha’s new film institute, the Gulf’s talent pool is flooded with choice.
However, most of the funds and grants are competition-driven and the Gulf’s filmmakers are just fledglings when compared to their West Asian counterparts with established traditions of cinema. They are also saddled with the added baggage of censorship.
On the sidelines of the forum, Al-Khaja adjusts her shayla to cover her hair, chatters away in perfect Hindi and says, “It’s still a struggle to be a filmmaker. I deal with controversial topics and I come from a conservative family, but if you love what you do, you have to keep at it.” Addressing her audience she had said, “The nation needs to trust that its filmmakers would be sensible when telling their stories.”
Censorship, in particular, rankles, when foreign movies carrying contentious content are beamed into local households via satellite television.
Mostafa’s City of Life contains scenes of young Emiratis drinking alcohol—forbidden in Islam—and an unmarried pregnant woman considering abortion—unacceptable and illegal in Gulf society.
“I knew from the beginning I was going to be walking on dangerous ground, making a film like City of Life,” says Mostafa, who is half British. He appealed to the country’s National Media Council for about six months before he started filming. Projects filmed in the UAE must submit their scripts to the council for approval. In the past, Hollywood’s Body of Lies and Sex and the City 2 had been denied permission to film in Dubai and Abu Dhabi respectively.
“City of Life was to premiere at DIFF last year, when it was banned,” Mostafa says. Finally, it was a phone call from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, pledging his “full support” that cleared the path for the screening.
It was a perfect Bollywood ending to the real-life script. The world premiere of the film was a gala screening. Despite warnings of a storm, the 1,000-seat arena was packed with Emiratis and expatriates. Hours before the red carpet was rolled out, thunder clapped and the clouds broke. It poured rain on the desert sands, but the show went on.
Mostafa, accompanied by his family and entire film cast that included Indian actors Sonu Sood and Javed Jaaferi, said to the television cameras, “It’s been a lot of work, but we’ve made it easier for the next guy.”