Opening night in Abu Dhabi
Opening night in Abu Dhabi, as earlier in Dubai, featured a prime candidate to win the Official Competition Gulf Features. Tora Bora is by Kuwaiti filmmaker Walid Al Awadi who tackled the difficult jihadi subject. A middle-aged husband and wife, Abu Tarek and Umm Tarek from Kuwait, go to Afghanistan to find their son Ahmed who listened to the voices of war and is now with extremists in the caves of Tora Bora. Veteran Kuwaiti actor Saad Al-Faraaj returned to film after decades away to play Abu Tarek.
Emirati films shine
A total of 347 films were screened during GFF, most of them shorts, with a number made by students from the Gulf. While most of the films came from the GCC, many were from the wider Middle East and the rest of the world. For me, in addition to Tora Bora, the Emirati films were the most interesting because they testify to the progress being made by Dubai and Abu Dhabi in promoting the development of film and its related industries.
Student films a highlight
14 films by young Emiratis were selected for the Gulf Student Short Competition, ten of them world premieres. I don’t have the space to mention most, but I’m focusing on two that seem especially important; the first for subject, the second for format.
Marwan Alhammadi is a student at Dubai Men’s College and is showing at GFF for the second time. Cats, one of the world premiere films, isn’t about domestic pets; these cats are wild animals living in Dubai homes. No animal expert anywhere in the world thinks this is a good idea, but nonetheless it goes on in the UAE.
This lion cub wasn’t more than an armful at the time of filming. By now, he’s much too big to handle at home as is the young lion relaxing outside a Dubai villa. Like any good documentary, Cats calls attention to a contemporary problem.
Mohammad Fikree is a 2D animator who produced and did everything else needed to create Children, the story of a mother and her children trying to escape from a scary, perhaps mythical beast. The style recalls the short story of three brothers in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. [Children – 2]. In ten quick minutes, Fikree creates beauty with a moral and doesn’t need three dimensions to do it.
Another contender
A rival for best Official Competition Gulf Features was Halabja – The Lost Children from Akram Hidou, a Syrian Kurd who emigrated to Germany in 1995. The film focuses on Ali who comes back to Halabja in Kurdistan 21 years after Saddam Hussein killed thousands with poison gas in 1988. Ali is on a mission to find his family and in fact finds five families that hope he is their missing son. Many children were lost; only a few were ever found.
April also saw yet another film festival, this one at Zayed University for students from around the Middle East. However, that seems to be it for a few months, giving the filmmakers time to work.
ADFF extension
The Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) has extended the deadline for submission of films to July 1. ADFF, the longest in the region, takes place from October 11-20 followed by the Dubai International Film Festival from December 9-16.
By Alma Kadragic
