The rough-and-tumble streets of Jaffa’s Ajami neighbourhood probably seasoned Scandar Copti for the Herculean task of making his first feature film, and also lent the film its propulsive realism. But it was his parents’ effort to keep him away from danger that pointed him towards his future career.
“They wanted to keep us off the streets, so they brought us a lot of films,” says the 34-year-old Palestinian. He remembers watching Bruce Lee and French movies on Betamax with his brothers as a child.
“I would try to understand, ‘How did they do this? How did they make this funny?’” he recalls. “So I would rewind them and watch them again and again.”
If his first film is any sign, Copti is a quick study.
Ajami, which he co-directed with Yaron Shani, has drawn large crowds and lavish praise, won a special mention for Best First Feature at the Cannes Film Festival and become the first mostly Arabic-language film to sweep Israel’s top film honours. Last month, the film received an Oscar nomination for the year’s Best Foreign Language Film.
Getting it to the screen was a fraught ordeal that took plenty of time. The idea of an urban crime drama filmed with non-professional actors first came to Shani, who grew up in a seaside village south of Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital, about a dozen years ago.
By 2002 he had put it on the back burner to organise a student film festival, where he came across Copti’s 12-minute mockumentary, The Truth. “‘He approached me and said, ‘Let’s work together, I like the way you think,’” says Copti, who gravitated to film after earning a degree in mechanical engineering from a prestigious Israeli university. “I said, ‘Whoa. What – a movie?’”
The two began working on a jigsaw puzzle of a script set in Ajami, a neighbourhood that offered a glimpse into the life of the roughly 1.5 million Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. Today a part of much larger Tel Aviv, Jaffa is an ancient seaport that dates to the eighth century BC. Most of the city’s Arab residents fled with the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and Jaffa now contains some 40,000 Jews and about 18,000 Arabs.
Nestled against the Mediterranean, Ajami is the city’s only predominantly Arab quarter. Some 25 per cent of its residents are Jewish, but with recent gentrification that number has been increasing – along with tensions.
Socio-economically, the neighbourhood is diverse. Judges live above criminals and doctors next to those on the margins. Shacks with no electricity sit near restaurants with gorgeous sea-views, like the one in the film. Copti worked there as a waiter and cook while he and Shani pounded out the script.
“It’s so hard to create something from nothing,” he says, citing scriptwriting as the most difficult part of making Ajami. “Sometimes you feel stupid, sometimes you have nothing to say and you lose your self-confidence.”
Finishing the screenplay took three and a half years. Then the two inexperienced filmmakers strolled into Israeli production houses peddling a movie that called for dozens of non-professional actors who would never see the script. It would be made mostly in Arabic and shot in chronological order, using two cameras simultaneously.
“‘What, are you nuts? Please close the door on your way out,’” Copti recalls one producer telling them. “We were knocking on the doors of producers and nobody wanted to get in.” Eventually they raised nearly $1 million (Dh3.7m) from German and French backers as well as an Israeli film fund.
Next they put the word out in the neighbourhood that they were looking for non-professional actors. Some 300 people turned up, from high-school kids to ex-convicts, mothers, sisters and former police officers. After several workshops they’d trimmed the group to a few dozen and began role-playing.
The goal was to move the participants – not actors – away from performing and towards reacting with real emotion. They were asked to crawl on the floor like serpents, to scream at the top of their lungs or chase each other with chairs. “We start with this and you are liberated, you don’t see the camera any more,” Copti explains. “Then, bit by bit we add emotions and start to see which participant would fit into which character.”
After 10 months of workshops and rehearsals, the cast was set. Filming began, with one unusual condition: none of the actors got a screenplay. “They had to trust us and we had to build this trust,” says Copti.
The shooting of one scene reveals the power of that bond. Three policemen are cruising around Jaffa one afternoon when they pull up along a curb. A scruffy man in torn clothing approaches their window. Mumbling, he offers them a pair of bright red boots. The policemen examine the boots and pass them back to the junkie, telling him off.
“He was a real junkie,” says Mr Copti, laughing. “He wasn't a part of our movie, he was just walking on the street, he didn't see the camera.” The incident was fitting, and stayed in the film, because seconds later the officers receive a call to arrest a drug dealer nearby. They soon pull up behind the dealer's car and start to yank him from the vehicle.
Dozens of young boys and men – placed there by the filmmakers and told to help their friend – pop out of nearby buildings. They swarm the police, striking the officers and wrestling with them and ultimately freeing the drug dealer. “It's real violence – it happened,” said Mr Copti. “We had to stop it, we had to jump from the monitor and say 'OK, cut. Kiss each other and let's do another take.'”
The filming took a brisk three weeks. All of Ajami pitched in: cars and locations were provided free of charge; and seeing the cast and crew working late into the night, residents brought Arabic coffee to the set.
Seven years after their first meeting, the co-directors had a film (both filmmakers got married in that span, Shani also became a father and learnt Arabic). But before its release, there was a final hurdle.
“We showed it to people, to sell it for distribution, and they said, ‘Look, it’s an amazing film, but nobody will watch it,’” Copti recalls. “‘It’s in Arabic, it’s complicated, it’s not pleasant. It will never make any box office.’”
In the end it was seen by hundreds of thousands of Israelis. That’s just one long-standing myth the film upset. Another is that Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and Christians are homogeneous groups. A third is that each side automatically blames the other for its predicament.
Harsh and gritty, Ajami follows the criss-crossing lives of a handful of neighbourhood residents. Omar, a young Muslim, tries to repay a family debt while wooing the Christian Palestinian daughter of a restaurateur. While working illegally in Ajami, a Palestinian teenager from the West Bank turns to crime to pay for his mother’s surgery back home. A combustible Israeli police officer desperately seeks answers about his brother’s disappearance.
Shani has said, “The film is about a society that is segregated, where people live in bubbles.”
Even so, the lives of the characters often paralleled the lives of the actors playing them. Copti’s brother Tony, who played the drug dealer in the film, was arrested earlier this month after coming to the aid of kids getting harassed by the police. The violent Israeli policeman whose brother goes missing is played by Eran Naim. A month before filming began, says Copti, he was dismissed from the police force after being caught on camera putting his fingers into the nostrils of an Israeli settler who was lying on the floor to protest at his evacuation from Gaza.
And the husband of the first-time actress Nisreen Siksik was chased for years by a gang of killers – once they shot him eight times, another time they bombed his car – before finally being ambushed in his shop. In the film, her son is stalked by a violent clan. Siksik, a 45-year-old mother of four who still lives in Ajami, has acknowledged how all of the old worries flooded back during the filming. Yet she has since acted in two more films.
Critics have given high praise to Ajami’s journalistic feel for daily life in a vendetta-fuelled district, its intelligence and even-handedness and its subtle approach to the most tangled of conflicts. “This is Ajami’s moment,” said The Wall Street Journal.
The most significant compliments might have come from an unlikely source. “What Ajami shows, in continually surprising revelations, is the essential core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: people on both sides trying to protect their loved ones and keep them alive, often with heartbreaking consequences,” wrote Bradley Burston, the film critic for the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Days after that review was published last September Ajami won best picture, best screenplay and best direction at the Ophirs, the Israeli version of the Academy Awards. Its nomination for an Oscar seemed inevitable.
Indeed, a film from Israel or the Palestinian territories has been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in four out of the last five years. The streak began in 2006 with the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now.
Copti condemns the Israeli government for exploiting the film as a promotional tool. He says Palestinians living in Israel have no equal rights, are treated with racism and not allowed to teach their history or culture. He hopes the film calls attention to their plight. “Acknowledging a group of people exists is the beginning,” he said. “When you know that something exists, you know it has problems. When you know that it has problems, it’s the first step in finding a solution.”
Oddsmakers say Ajami’s Oscar chances are slim. But if it were to win, Shani would be the first Israeli to win the Oscar, and Copti the first Palestinian. “I never made this film to get awards or nominations,” says Copti, who is taking a break from filmmaking to work as the director of community outreach and a programming official with the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. “Getting Israelis to watch it, in Arabic, and to identify with a Palestinian character – to cry when his mother is crying, to humanise him again after 60 years of demonising Arabs and portraying them as terrorists, as inhuman – that’s been the most rewarding thing.”
------
An edited version of this story appeared in the 26 February The National, www.thenational.ae
Showing posts with label Doha Tribeca Film Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doha Tribeca Film Festival. Show all posts
3.01.2010
2.21.2010
T time in Qatar
Style is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind of when you think of Qatar, but that might be about to change.
When The New York Times launched T magazine in the autumn of 2004 it was something of a revelation for the oft-stodgy daily. A hundred-plus pages of rich, seductive photography and articles focused on the hip and stylish: a look at the “under-the-radar cool” of Brussels, the style choices of Lenny Kravitz and his daughter Zoe, and Pedro Almodóvar’s favourite red carpets, to name a few.
The European demimonde gave its official seal of approval a few years later. At a lavish and ultra-exclusive gala for the launch of T’s International Herald Tribune edition, held in a cavernous Milan exhibition space, editors, designers and contributors mingled with the likes of Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Donatella Versace, the Oscar-winning Rachel Weisz and the ubiquitous Mischa Barton.
The old grey mare of American journalism – with its black and white graphics and substance-heavy content – had become the belle of the ball.
Now that same smart style has come to the Gulf, in the form of T Qatar, a partnership between The New York Times and the Doha-based Oryx Advertising, which will publish the local edition. Time will tell whether the new publication will give Doha the same sort of makeover, but inside sources say the idea took root fast.
“They were looking to deploy in the Middle East, scouting the market, and came across us,” says Ravi Raman, the vice president of Oryx, talking about his company’s first meeting with the Times last April. “Both sides were immediately on board.”
The pairing is not a complete shock. T Qatar represents the second major New York-Doha cultural tie-up in the past year. The Doha Tribeca Film Festival imported Big Apple buzz, cinema and celebrity with its inaugural event last October. And T magazine’s raison d’être has always been the advertisements – glossy appeals for the latest Ferrari sunglasses, Yves Saint Laurent fragrance or Girard-Perregaux watches.
With Qatar on the cusp of a great boom – the IMF estimates GDP growth of 18.5 per cent in 2010, the world’s fastest – and top-of-the-line property and retail developments such as the Pearl and Lusail coming online in the coming months and years, the greater Doha area will soon be a high-end marketer’s paradise.
No surprise, then, that T Qatar previewed its first issue at this week’s much-hyped watches and jewellery exhibition and on the boardwalk of the Pearl. At first glance, it’s much like an issue of the original magazine, with gorgeous design, sumptuous images and dozens of luxury ads.
Upon closer inspection, it is in many ways an old issue of T; all but a few of the stories are reprints from earlier issues of the New York version. The cover story, on the British actor Michael Fassbender, for instance, is lifted from an issue of T published last autumn.
Mr Raman says that even when T Qatar hits its stride next year – the magazine will be every two months in 2010, monthly in 2011 – only about a third of the content will be original.
Those stories will focus on Qatar and the region and also run in Arabic towards the back of the magazine.
In the first issue, the original stories were a profile of a Doha expatriate artist, an assessment of the Museum of Islamic Art, and a look at the Pearl.
“This is about not just fashion, not just style, but with a culture and art focus,” says Raman. “Basically we’re looking at a person who is stylish and appreciates quality, quality of design, quality of life.”
Will those quality-seekers spend 20 Qatari riyals for travel, design and style insights that have been available free at the T website for months? That might feel like arriving at a fabulous party just as it’s winding down, the buzz evaporating.
Yet Oryx is sure to highlight the fresher, local content. Even slightly dated, this intelligent and locally flavoured ode to consumerism, style and the high-end zeitgeist will, for wealthy Gulf denizens, probably become the sort of status symbol advertised in its pages.
With any luck, T Qatar will in a few years throw a coronation party that outdoes T magazine’s Milan shindig. It will coincide with some anniversary or product launch. It will be held at the Museum of Islamic Art, perhaps during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. And Mischa Barton will be there.
---------
originally appeared in Feb 21 The National, www.thenational.ae
When The New York Times launched T magazine in the autumn of 2004 it was something of a revelation for the oft-stodgy daily. A hundred-plus pages of rich, seductive photography and articles focused on the hip and stylish: a look at the “under-the-radar cool” of Brussels, the style choices of Lenny Kravitz and his daughter Zoe, and Pedro Almodóvar’s favourite red carpets, to name a few.
The European demimonde gave its official seal of approval a few years later. At a lavish and ultra-exclusive gala for the launch of T’s International Herald Tribune edition, held in a cavernous Milan exhibition space, editors, designers and contributors mingled with the likes of Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Donatella Versace, the Oscar-winning Rachel Weisz and the ubiquitous Mischa Barton.
The old grey mare of American journalism – with its black and white graphics and substance-heavy content – had become the belle of the ball.
Now that same smart style has come to the Gulf, in the form of T Qatar, a partnership between The New York Times and the Doha-based Oryx Advertising, which will publish the local edition. Time will tell whether the new publication will give Doha the same sort of makeover, but inside sources say the idea took root fast.
“They were looking to deploy in the Middle East, scouting the market, and came across us,” says Ravi Raman, the vice president of Oryx, talking about his company’s first meeting with the Times last April. “Both sides were immediately on board.”
The pairing is not a complete shock. T Qatar represents the second major New York-Doha cultural tie-up in the past year. The Doha Tribeca Film Festival imported Big Apple buzz, cinema and celebrity with its inaugural event last October. And T magazine’s raison d’être has always been the advertisements – glossy appeals for the latest Ferrari sunglasses, Yves Saint Laurent fragrance or Girard-Perregaux watches.
With Qatar on the cusp of a great boom – the IMF estimates GDP growth of 18.5 per cent in 2010, the world’s fastest – and top-of-the-line property and retail developments such as the Pearl and Lusail coming online in the coming months and years, the greater Doha area will soon be a high-end marketer’s paradise.
No surprise, then, that T Qatar previewed its first issue at this week’s much-hyped watches and jewellery exhibition and on the boardwalk of the Pearl. At first glance, it’s much like an issue of the original magazine, with gorgeous design, sumptuous images and dozens of luxury ads.
Upon closer inspection, it is in many ways an old issue of T; all but a few of the stories are reprints from earlier issues of the New York version. The cover story, on the British actor Michael Fassbender, for instance, is lifted from an issue of T published last autumn.
Mr Raman says that even when T Qatar hits its stride next year – the magazine will be every two months in 2010, monthly in 2011 – only about a third of the content will be original.
Those stories will focus on Qatar and the region and also run in Arabic towards the back of the magazine.
In the first issue, the original stories were a profile of a Doha expatriate artist, an assessment of the Museum of Islamic Art, and a look at the Pearl.
“This is about not just fashion, not just style, but with a culture and art focus,” says Raman. “Basically we’re looking at a person who is stylish and appreciates quality, quality of design, quality of life.”
Will those quality-seekers spend 20 Qatari riyals for travel, design and style insights that have been available free at the T website for months? That might feel like arriving at a fabulous party just as it’s winding down, the buzz evaporating.
Yet Oryx is sure to highlight the fresher, local content. Even slightly dated, this intelligent and locally flavoured ode to consumerism, style and the high-end zeitgeist will, for wealthy Gulf denizens, probably become the sort of status symbol advertised in its pages.
With any luck, T Qatar will in a few years throw a coronation party that outdoes T magazine’s Milan shindig. It will coincide with some anniversary or product launch. It will be held at the Museum of Islamic Art, perhaps during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. And Mischa Barton will be there.
---------
originally appeared in Feb 21 The National, www.thenational.ae
1.17.2010
Qatar's cultural ambitions: take one
Doha // Khalifa al Maraikhi shoulders a heavy burden.
“Every nation has a culture,” said the director of Aqaribabzah, the first Qatari feature film. “As an artist, filmmaker or musician, it’s important to reflect this culture into your art.”
As Doha steps into the spotlight as the Arab Capital of Culture for 2010 – an Arab League and UN designation – its budding reputation as a cultural centre is at stake.
Previous recipients of the honour, including Damascus, Jerusalem and Algiers, have found the designation both opportunity and test for their nascent arts scenes.
In Qatar, dozens of artists, artisans and government officials have already prepared more than a hundred events, including music recitals, heritage festivals, calligraphy contests and art exhibits.
Mr al Maraikhi's Aqaribabzah ("Clockwise" in Arabic) might be the bellwether. Financed, produced and directed by Qataris, it represents the filmmaking ambitions of a country of some 250,000 people. It also highlights one of Qatar’s few native art forms.
The film, set in the 1930s, is based on the Gulf legend of three men who make a Faustian bargain with a djinn in exchange for the ability to become master fijiri singers. Although there are several different genres, fijiri music generally comprises a lead singer accompanied by a clapping, drum-playing chorus. The form originated more than a century ago among pearl divers of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, and remains popular in the region.
At the same time, Aqaribabzah underscores Qatar’s cultural shortcomings. Five years ago, Mr al Maraikhi and a friend wrote a script based on the folk tale and passed the story on to a few acquaintances.
But with no film production studios in Qatar, nothing came of it until last January, when the country received the cultural capital honour.
Within weeks, the ministry of culture, arts and heritage approved the film with a 10 million rial (Dh10.1m) budget. “In the US and Europe there are production companies that invest in films,” said Mr al Maraikhi, 50. “Here we don’t have those – we need the government to help us.”
The film’s composer is Howard Shore, an American who scored the Martin Scorsese film The Aviator. The cinematographer, assistant director and crew are Bollywood veterans flown in from India. The lead actress, Maisa Magribi, is from Morocco.
The rest of the cast and crew are Qatari, but with little experience.
On the last day of shooting a few weeks ago, the director sidled up to his thobe-wearing leads after an unsatisfactory take. Using words and gestures, he explained his vision for the scene, returned to his chair behind a stack of monitors and shouted, “Action!”.
The room froze – except for the actors, whose faces expressed great fear as they cautiously descended into a cave marked by grotesque wall paintings.
“I’m getting tired of telling actors what to do,” said Mr al Maraikhi, whose Qatari cast has only worked on stage or on TV serials. “Film acting is different, every movement, every expression is important; we’ve had to teach them that. They started out a bit nervous, now they’re doing all right.”
Initially scheduled to hit theatres in March, Aqaribabzah’s release was pushed back to May, following post-production in Bangkok. The delay is due, in part, to Qatar’s lack of facilities.
“Everybody is talking about a film industry, but this requires studios, screenwriters, experienced actors, filmmakers and a market,” said Mr al Maraikhi, who studied filmmaking in Los Angeles before returning to Qatar in the 1990s to make short films and music videos. “We just don’t have film production experience here. What we have is maybe the beginning of a film movement.”
That movement would include the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, held here last November. As well as attracting large crowds, it may also have uncovered some young filmmaking talent.
That same week, the Qatari media group Alnoor Holdings launched a US$200 million (Dh740m) film fund that plans to partner as yet unnamed Hollywood players to make a dozen feature films over five years, starting with a $100m film about the life of Prophet Mohammed.
Although not widely known, Qatar has a budding music, art and poetry scene too, which the government has been trying to promote.
In poetry, Ali al Muri, a Qatari, has in recent weeks proved to be one of the more entertaining and successful contestants on the current season of the reality TV show, Million’s Poet.
A recent religious and cultural festival organised by the Fanar Islamic Centre included well-attended poetry recitals, along with calligraphy and other exhibitions.
In terms of music, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra regularly performs classical and operatic pieces, and presented a programme of eight Puccini arias this past week. During Qatar’s National Day celebrations last month, dozens of fijiri musicians and singers performed at malls and parks across Doha. And the Qatar Foundation is set to open the Qatar Music Academy in September. Open to all nationalities, it will focus on Arab music, highlighting links to American jazz and European composition.
Regular art shows attract nationals and expats to small, chic galleries in Souq Waqif, a popular downtown Doha quarter remade into a traditional souq. In March, Sotheby’s opened a Doha office – its first in the Gulf. And before moving on to cities including Abu Dhabi, Amman, New York, Paris and Berlin, the Art Wanson Gallery last month launched the world tour of its exhibition Passion for Art at Doha’s Grand Hyatt Hotel.
“Doha is fast becoming a hub of art and culture and we want to be a part of the process,” said Mercedes Duerinckx, who owns the gallery, based in Marbella, Spain.
But it is the much-praised Museum of Islamic Art, which offers one of the region’s most dynamic collections of art and artifacts, that made Qatar’s name in international arts. The museum opened in January 2009 and is planning a host of exhibits and screenings in conjunction with the cultural capital title.
Qatari leaders acknowledge that Doha’s art scene does not build on tradition. Rather they intend to build a new foundation for art in the Qatari capital. “We are not buying culture, we are investing in culture,” said Abdullah Najjar, the chief executive of the Qatar Museums Authority. “It is something that will be seen by future generations as an important investment.”
Aqaribabzah is among the most high-profile of those investments.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” said Salah Darwish, one of the film’s leading stars.
The 57-year-old Qatari studied drama in Cairo and earned acting awards in Damascus but stopped performing 26 years ago because of a dearth of good roles. “There were no interesting stories, no good parts,” he said. “But this film could change everything.”
Mr al Maraikhi hopes to take Aqaribabzah to international festivals, and to make more movies in the future. But first he is looking to the film’s premiere, as part of Doha’s year as the Arab Capital of Culture.
“It’s a big deal, because you’ll have many people, many countries seeing what Qatar is doing at the moment,” he said. “We don’t expect to make millions out of this film, but we hope that people enjoy it.”
--------
originally published 15 Jan, 2010, in The National:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100115/FOREIGN/701149898/1135
“Every nation has a culture,” said the director of Aqaribabzah, the first Qatari feature film. “As an artist, filmmaker or musician, it’s important to reflect this culture into your art.”
As Doha steps into the spotlight as the Arab Capital of Culture for 2010 – an Arab League and UN designation – its budding reputation as a cultural centre is at stake.
Previous recipients of the honour, including Damascus, Jerusalem and Algiers, have found the designation both opportunity and test for their nascent arts scenes.
In Qatar, dozens of artists, artisans and government officials have already prepared more than a hundred events, including music recitals, heritage festivals, calligraphy contests and art exhibits.
Mr al Maraikhi's Aqaribabzah ("Clockwise" in Arabic) might be the bellwether. Financed, produced and directed by Qataris, it represents the filmmaking ambitions of a country of some 250,000 people. It also highlights one of Qatar’s few native art forms.
The film, set in the 1930s, is based on the Gulf legend of three men who make a Faustian bargain with a djinn in exchange for the ability to become master fijiri singers. Although there are several different genres, fijiri music generally comprises a lead singer accompanied by a clapping, drum-playing chorus. The form originated more than a century ago among pearl divers of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, and remains popular in the region.
At the same time, Aqaribabzah underscores Qatar’s cultural shortcomings. Five years ago, Mr al Maraikhi and a friend wrote a script based on the folk tale and passed the story on to a few acquaintances.
But with no film production studios in Qatar, nothing came of it until last January, when the country received the cultural capital honour.
Within weeks, the ministry of culture, arts and heritage approved the film with a 10 million rial (Dh10.1m) budget. “In the US and Europe there are production companies that invest in films,” said Mr al Maraikhi, 50. “Here we don’t have those – we need the government to help us.”
The film’s composer is Howard Shore, an American who scored the Martin Scorsese film The Aviator. The cinematographer, assistant director and crew are Bollywood veterans flown in from India. The lead actress, Maisa Magribi, is from Morocco.
The rest of the cast and crew are Qatari, but with little experience.
On the last day of shooting a few weeks ago, the director sidled up to his thobe-wearing leads after an unsatisfactory take. Using words and gestures, he explained his vision for the scene, returned to his chair behind a stack of monitors and shouted, “Action!”.
The room froze – except for the actors, whose faces expressed great fear as they cautiously descended into a cave marked by grotesque wall paintings.
“I’m getting tired of telling actors what to do,” said Mr al Maraikhi, whose Qatari cast has only worked on stage or on TV serials. “Film acting is different, every movement, every expression is important; we’ve had to teach them that. They started out a bit nervous, now they’re doing all right.”
Initially scheduled to hit theatres in March, Aqaribabzah’s release was pushed back to May, following post-production in Bangkok. The delay is due, in part, to Qatar’s lack of facilities.
“Everybody is talking about a film industry, but this requires studios, screenwriters, experienced actors, filmmakers and a market,” said Mr al Maraikhi, who studied filmmaking in Los Angeles before returning to Qatar in the 1990s to make short films and music videos. “We just don’t have film production experience here. What we have is maybe the beginning of a film movement.”
That movement would include the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, held here last November. As well as attracting large crowds, it may also have uncovered some young filmmaking talent.
That same week, the Qatari media group Alnoor Holdings launched a US$200 million (Dh740m) film fund that plans to partner as yet unnamed Hollywood players to make a dozen feature films over five years, starting with a $100m film about the life of Prophet Mohammed.
Although not widely known, Qatar has a budding music, art and poetry scene too, which the government has been trying to promote.
In poetry, Ali al Muri, a Qatari, has in recent weeks proved to be one of the more entertaining and successful contestants on the current season of the reality TV show, Million’s Poet.
A recent religious and cultural festival organised by the Fanar Islamic Centre included well-attended poetry recitals, along with calligraphy and other exhibitions.
In terms of music, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra regularly performs classical and operatic pieces, and presented a programme of eight Puccini arias this past week. During Qatar’s National Day celebrations last month, dozens of fijiri musicians and singers performed at malls and parks across Doha. And the Qatar Foundation is set to open the Qatar Music Academy in September. Open to all nationalities, it will focus on Arab music, highlighting links to American jazz and European composition.
Regular art shows attract nationals and expats to small, chic galleries in Souq Waqif, a popular downtown Doha quarter remade into a traditional souq. In March, Sotheby’s opened a Doha office – its first in the Gulf. And before moving on to cities including Abu Dhabi, Amman, New York, Paris and Berlin, the Art Wanson Gallery last month launched the world tour of its exhibition Passion for Art at Doha’s Grand Hyatt Hotel.
“Doha is fast becoming a hub of art and culture and we want to be a part of the process,” said Mercedes Duerinckx, who owns the gallery, based in Marbella, Spain.
But it is the much-praised Museum of Islamic Art, which offers one of the region’s most dynamic collections of art and artifacts, that made Qatar’s name in international arts. The museum opened in January 2009 and is planning a host of exhibits and screenings in conjunction with the cultural capital title.
Qatari leaders acknowledge that Doha’s art scene does not build on tradition. Rather they intend to build a new foundation for art in the Qatari capital. “We are not buying culture, we are investing in culture,” said Abdullah Najjar, the chief executive of the Qatar Museums Authority. “It is something that will be seen by future generations as an important investment.”
Aqaribabzah is among the most high-profile of those investments.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” said Salah Darwish, one of the film’s leading stars.
The 57-year-old Qatari studied drama in Cairo and earned acting awards in Damascus but stopped performing 26 years ago because of a dearth of good roles. “There were no interesting stories, no good parts,” he said. “But this film could change everything.”
Mr al Maraikhi hopes to take Aqaribabzah to international festivals, and to make more movies in the future. But first he is looking to the film’s premiere, as part of Doha’s year as the Arab Capital of Culture.
“It’s a big deal, because you’ll have many people, many countries seeing what Qatar is doing at the moment,” he said. “We don’t expect to make millions out of this film, but we hope that people enjoy it.”
--------
originally published 15 Jan, 2010, in The National:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100115/FOREIGN/701149898/1135
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