It feels much bigger than it is. Into its sixth edition, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) screened 81 features and 84 shorts from 48 countries. But before entering the world of cinema, you entered the monumental Emirates Palace Hotel, home to festival offices, guests and film screenings. The effect of the spatial spread of the hotel is staggering. Perched at the tip of the Abu Dhabi Corniche, this ostentatious building arouses awe and confusion as you walk endlessly from the entrance to your room, from room to ballroom, then to the Press Lounge and so on. With its twelve different shades of marble and other precious metals, its cavernous central dome, its walls and other bric-a-brac painted with gold leaf, one thousand Swarovski crystal chandeliers, a private beach, helipad, eighty-five acres of landscaped gardens, fifteen restaurants, countless banquet halls and much more of everything else, the hotel dwarfs you completely. And on the anvil in the Emirati capital is a Louvre Abu Dhabi and a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi!
The number of films may not have been higher than in earlier years, but it’s the same opulence, the same red carpet buzz. This year’s opening film was a thriller: Arbitrage by Nicholas Jarecki. And walking the red carpet were Richard Gere, co-star Nate Parker, Jerecki and two producers. Shabana Azmi, who headed the Narrative Competition Jury, was there, and so was superstar Mammooty (Farah Khan and Javed Jaffrey were on the carpet for the closing).
ADFF is now under the purview of TwoFour54, a government-backed media and creative industries hub in the Emirates. According to Intishal al Timimi, Director of the Arabic Programme, the prize money was a USD 1 million, but the number of guests he couldn’t count! “The focus on films from this region is natural, he said. Nearly every festival does that. What’s important also that the programme should reflect the possibilities of the city. We are growing and improving, but there is no need to have a spread so big as to screen to half-empty halls.”
With five competitions (Narrative Feature, New Horizons, i.e., a director’s 1st or 2nd feature, Documentaries, Short Film and Emirates Film) apart from a Showcase Section, Special Programmes, Master Classes and talks/conferences, ADFF had enough for the audience it commands.
Of specific interest was cinema from the Arab world. The Abu Dhabi package showed a burning concern for issues that plague some of these countries today. In a way, the films were instinctively bound together by a thematic coherence, by a plea for freedom and justice that they seemed to hold. There was apprehension here, and there was eloquence.
Moroccan director Mohcine Besri debut feature shows how people from the same country can cling to radically opposed beliefs. In The Miscreants, religious fundamentalism is pitted against secular values, as a group of kidnappers confront the kidnapped. Both see their deepest convictions being put to test. But underlying this opposition is another idea: that people do have a great deal in common whatever their differences, and that what is precious is doubt, not certainty about one’s beliefs.
Expectedly, several stories had backdrop of political and religious mayhem as their backdrop. In Hidden Beauties by Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid (a World Premiere and funded by Sanad, the Festival’s post-production and development fund), two women try to empower themselves and strive for equality with men. Looked at by disapproving male eyes, one resists donning the veil and the other resists taking it off. But they stand together in their fight. The film won the Best Director from the Arab World award in the Narrative Feature Competition.
Acclaimed Egyptian director Yousri Nasrallah’s After the Battle (also Sanad-funded) is a tale of a man and a woman on opposite sides of the political divide in Egypt. The man, a tourist guide who takes visitors around the Pyramids on horseback, is forced by Mubarak’s lackeys to charge at revolutionaries in Tahrir Square; but when the regime falls, he is ostracised. The woman, from a fancy neighbourhood, is an ardent militant. The film draws us into the heart of the revolution, even as a chance encounter between the two changes their lives and raises questions about the revolution itself. In a special ceremony, Nasrallah received the Variety Middle East Filmmaker of the Year Award.
Hala Abdalla’s documentary As If We Were Catching a Cobra (funded by Sanad) echoes the headlines that hit India a few weeks ago: cartoons. Cartoonists, illustrators, graphic artists and even a novelist are interviewed by the Egyptian director in Damascus and Cairo. They display before the camera works they had dared not publish. But even as they reflect on the situation in their countries, revolutions actually erupt in the Middle East, and the film blends with the evolving political scenario. One artist dies, another is beaten senseless, a third flees. Where is the space for irony and satire in countries with censorship, Hala wonders.
Harraga Blues by Moussa Haddad (Algeria), which had its World Premiere here, is on illegal emigration, on people who try to escape Algerian shores by boat to a new beginning in Europe and elsewhere; but many lose their lives in the hazardous crossing.