cover story Left to right: Nayla Al Khaja, Aisha Alzaabi, Ali Mostafa, Majid Al Ansari and Ali bin Matar
he legendary film director Elia Kazan once described directors as people on the edge. “A film director has to get a shot, no matter what he does. We’re desperate people,” he famously said. It is the great irony of movie-making. All the beauty ends up on screen but the struggle to create the art remains unseen. And of all the roles in the film industry, the most difficult is surely the director’s. It is reassuring, then, to see how many Emiratis have taken to the role – particularly since the idea of an Emirati film industry might have seemed absurd even a few years ago. Before the turn of the century, there was almost no infrastructure for aspiring filmmakers. Being an Emirati director would have been as unimaginable as being an astronaut. Yet as the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) prepares to roll out the red carpet in the Madinat Jumeirah for the 13th year for a list of Hollywood A-listers and regional celebrities, it heralds a remarkable transformation for an industry which was non-existent just three decades ago. There were films being made, of course, usually low-budget short films relying on local and regional film festivals for support. These days, Emirati films
such as Zinzana (2015) and Djinn (2013) offer Hollywood production values and can stand on their own merits: Zinzana, for example, is a taut thriller that revels in its psychosis and reveals its director Majid Al Ansari to be an expert at getting the best out of his actors, using a single set to heighten the drama. Another milestone movie is City of Life, the first Emirati film to be given a general release in UAE cinemas in 2010. Directed by Ali Mostafa, it tackled subjects never-before-seen in an Emirati film such as gang and youth culture and some of the harsher realities of life in Dubai. As the country’s directors have become more experienced, the stories they are telling are evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated. Yet for an Emirati growing up in the 1980s, there were no local filmmakers to look up to. Indeed, the first Emirati feature film - an Arabic language film called Abr Sabeel by Ali Al Abdul - only dates back to 1989 and was not followed until 2005 by Al Hilm, or The Dream, the first commercially released film, showing just how nascent the film industry is in the UAE. By contrast, the first Egyptian feature film, Layla, was made in 1927. DIFF was set up in
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