Ambition, opulence, scale, stars and good cinema — that’s the way it is at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Into its fourth year, it lays out the red carpet beyond the customary red carpet for stars to glide on. The grandiose sea-front Emirates Palace Hotel (the main venue) — hi-tech and full of monumental splendour as can be found only in the Gulf; the non-stop shuttle services from venue to venue and to hotels; the royal feasts called luncheons, funds that support Arab cinema, generous money for the Black Pearl and other awards (I counted nearly $1,400,000), and the stars — Abbas Kiarostami, Freida Pinto, Julianne Moore, Uma Thurman, Clive Owen, Adrien Brody, Murali Nair, Irrfan Khan, Mahie Gill and Tigmanshu Dhulia together with a constellation from the Arab world.
Abu Dhabi (the name translates as Father of the Deer, the native gazelles that are important symbols of culture) has done what few could do — install a major international festival in a land where film culture is still nascent. Says its executive director Peter Scarlet (formerly artistic director of the Tribeca and San Francisco Film Festivals and who was the first non-Frenchman to head the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris): “I remember meeting an Emirati woman before I came to work here, and she told me she didn’t think movies could do what books do. I gave her a copy of Pather Panchali. A week later, she came back to me and told me she was blown away.”
Formerly known as the Middle East International Film Festival, the Abu Dhabi Festival, mixed luxury with purpose: good cinema, a platform for Arab directors, master classes and workshops. The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, which supports the Festival, launched a Film Commission last year and a series of initiatives this year to perk up cinema: training programmes, marketing opportunities, SANAD (development and post-production fund for Arab directors with an annual budget of $500,000 that also ensures international exposure and year-round publicity to the films supported), the Sasha Grant for a screenwriting competition, the Circle Conference for producers, financiers and filmmakers from around the world, and New Voices — an annual development programme resulting in six half-hour documentaries slated for regional television broadcast.
There’s more: overseas internships for UAE nationals, with a focus as much on the business side of filmmaking as on production, distribution and sales; with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a programme entitled “Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema,” to track the largely unknown film heritage of the Arab world; and a Family Day for kids and parents with the screening of Chaplin’s The Circus and a posse of animated short films — and free activities, entertainment and refreshments.
Beyond the 172 films (32 world premieres, 26 international premieres, the several competition sections) from 43 countries, 500 volunteers and scores of cars — their drivers working 18-20 hours a day — was the wonderful screening of one of the cinema’s great restored classics: Metropolis by Fritz Lang. This 1927 black-and-white silent science-fiction film, restored recently after missing footage was found in Argentina, had a rapt audience through all of its 150 minutes. First shown at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year accompanied by a live orchestra of the original score, Abu Dhabi brought in a recorded version of that score.
Kicking off the festivities was Secretariat, a pulsating saga by Randall Wallace of the legendary horse, the most successful famous racehorse of all time. It closed with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s martial arts epic full of sumptuous sets, palace intrigue and bizarre deaths and murders.
Screened at the opening ceremony was renowned Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s latest short work, The Accordion, made as part of an international project to support the Universal Declaration of Human rights. Panahi, imprisoned earlier this year and now released, is still not allowed to travel.
Five competition sections, nothing less (with Nandana Sen on the jury of the New Horizons competition), besides films out of competition, brought in a clutch of wonderful films. The Best Narrative Feature award was won most deservedly by a Russian film, Silent Souls by Aleksei Fedorchenko, as a tribute to the ethnic Merja community that dissolved into the Russian some 400 years ago. Imposing and subtle with formidable camera work and few words, the film takes you through a cold empty countryside as a man (whose wife has just died) and his friend take the body to a riverside for cremation. Along the way, the film reveals a few Merja customs where water is the lifeline. Its unexpected end somehow fits is perfectly with the community’s traditions and the flow of the film.
The Competition section also included Olivier Assayas’ Carlos on the notorious, glamorous terrorist Carlos; The Ditch by Chinese director Wang Bing, a saga of dissidents condemned to hard labour under terrifying conditions in the Gobi desert in the late 1950s during the country’s Great Leap Forward; Incendies by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, the story of a woman (perhaps somewhere in Lebanon) who endures frightful ordeals and, before she dies, sends her children on a quest for a family they never knew they had; Julian Schnabel’s Miral (with Freida Pinto), a tale of Arab women living under Israeli occupation; Francois Ozon’s Potiche, for once a fast-paced humorous story (with Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve) of troubles at an umbrella factory and the transformation of Deneuve from a “potiche” (trophy wife) to a self-assured business woman; Taming by Syrian director Nidal Aldibs whose protagonist is weak and cowardly yet likeable. The film moves away from its realistic beginnings, throwing you off balance with its flow into the mystical-magical; and, among others, Murali Nair’s Laadli Laila, the story of a man whose barren goat is the love of his life. As he tries to get it mated, he encounters every hurdle that India can throw up, and Nair paints a deliberately exaggerated picture of the country’s idiosyncrasies.
War and its consequences, the West Asian imbroglio, and issues of Arab identity figured in several of the documentaries and short films. A “What in the World are we Doing to our World?” section highlighted films on environment, extinction of species, the pervasive use of lethal chemicals, industrial food production and so on, not all of them grim and depressing.
West is West by Andy de Emmony, a follow-up to East is East by Damien O’Donnell received the Audience Award. Starring Om Puri — who plays the patriarch in both films — the film revisits the East-West conundrum and cultural rifts with its jaunty style. And The Oath by American filmmaker Laura Poitras, an intertwining story of Abu Jandal, a Yemenite who worked for several years as the personal bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, and of Salim Hamdan, his brother-in-law who he inducted into bin Laden’s service as a driver. Hamdan was arrested by the US Army and spent several years in Guantanamo and kept in detention for seven years. He was deemed eligible for trial by the military commission for unspecified crimes. Poitras follows the trial of the first man to face the controversial military tribunal who was even provided with a defence lawyer by the US Army.
The Netpac award went to the wonderful film Zephyr by Turkish director Belma Bas for “its very sensitive and restrained way of telling a story of loss and growing up, with stunning cinematography.”
Abu Dhabi was a tasty potpourri of films, but an unparalleled opportunity of discovering what the Arab cinema is all about: small yet, but increasingly significant.