Making a scene

Kaleem Aftab

• Last Updated: December 11. 2008 9:30AM UAE / December 11. 2008 5:30AM GMT

I must admit that when the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) was launched five years ago, I was sceptical. I’ve been writing about film – and going to festivals – for 10 years, and I didn’t think that it would become a player on the oversaturated film festival calendar. Looking at the programme for the fifth festival, which runs from today to Dec 18 and features 181 films from 66 countries, I’ve had to rework my opinion. OK, I admit it, I was wrong.

There were several reasons why I thought that DIFF would be only a novelty fixture on the film festival calendar. The main one was that there didn’t seem to be any room for yet another high- profile film event. There are hundreds of film festivals around the world every year, and almost every country seems to have one. But for decades the only three that counted were Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Then, proving that with the right planning and strategy small festivals can become big players, Sundance and Toronto became part of the elite.

Now that doesn’t mean that these mammoths are the only festivals of cinema worth attending. Indeed, it’s often at the smaller film festivals that one has the greatest time. My favourite all-time festival experience was at the Amazonas Film Festival, in the jungle-encircled Brazilian city of Manaus. For a week you were encamped with like-minded folk determined to have a good time. The small size of the festival also meant that you found yourself having breakfast with the likes of Bill Pullman and Matt Dillon every day. But if DIFF had ended up being only a boutique festival, everyone would have considered it a failure.

Like the Middle East International Film Festival, DIFF also planned to use the event to attract filmmakers to make movies in the UAE. The Marrakech Film Festival has been extremely successful in encouraging attendees to think about using the fabulous studio in the Moroccan desert town of Ouzaratte, a favourite filming venue of Martin Scorsese. Others have followed. The early signs of how successful the efforts to attract filmmakers to the region will be are positive, and even more so given that the current global financial climate means filmmakers are willing to travel farther to secure finance.

The growing importance of the Gulf as a hotbed of production for world cinema was highlighted when the trade magazine Variety decided to employ a Middle East correspondent for the first time. The great challenge was the need to nurture and encourage domestic talent. Perhaps the greatest strides that this young festival has made have been in this department. The line-up of Arab films has never been stronger whether that be in the Gulf Voices section or the candidates for the Muhr Awards for Excellence in Arab Cinema. One of the results of this fast-paced development is that the International Federation of Film Critics is launching an annual Prize of International Critics for best Arab feature film at the festival this year.

Even the ambitious plan to create a film co-production market is showing new shoots. Eight of the 15 projects presented at the Dubai Film Connection (DFC) last year have since been greenlit. Five projects have already completed filming and a further three are scheduled to go into production soon. Given the high hit rate of its inaugural year, it’s no surprise that this year there were 108 applications from 25 nations for a place at the pitching event. Eighteen projects have been selected to take part in the DFC, and prize money has been increased.

This year, DIFF is launching another initiative, The Dubai Film Market. Film markets are places where companies and sales agents, tout their wares and try to sell films to international distributors. Markets are notoriously difficult to create at film festivals, and one of the reasons that Venice has lost some of its lustre to Toronto is that very little business is done there. Venice is spending more than 100 million euros on a new cinema complex on the Lido in an effort to change this.

Five years ago, the festival chairman Abdulhamid Juma said that he dreamt that this festival would one day rival Cannes. DIFF may still have a long way to go to catch up to Cannes, but it’s come a lot further than most people envisaged when he made his bold statement in 2003.

The growth of the festival and also the desire to allow more Dubai residents to attend is also demonstrated by the adding of the Grand Cinemas at Dubai Festival City as a screening venue. The other venues are Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai Media City and the Mall of the Emirates. And let’s face it, what counts at any film festival is a good selection of films and a generous helping of glamour. DIFF looks like it is going to deliver in both these departments this year.

In previous years, George Clooney and Morgan Freeman have attended. This year, the stars are plentiful. The Wild at Heart star Nicolas Cage will be in attendance when the producer Charles Roven (The Dark Knight, The Brothers Grimm) receives a Filmmaker of the Year award. Terry Gilliam, the director of 12 Monkeys and Time Bandits, will receive a DIFF Salutes award. The Moroccan director of Days of Glory, Rachid Bouchareb, is the Arab recipient of this award and his first film, Little Senegal, will be shown. The great Chinese director and producer Tsui Hark also will be recognised in this category.

Salma Hayek, Goldie Hawn and Laura Linney are set to appear on the red carpet for the amfAR charity event. Also attending will be the Heaven on Earth star Preity Zinta, who is the honorary chairwoman of amfAR’s Cinema Against Aids Dubai Event. Indian cinema will be prominent, with Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra presenting their work in progress Delhi 6.

The legendary Anil Kapoor and the newcomer Freida Pinto will be in town to show what is the most eagerly anticipated premiere at the festival, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.

The controversial American director Oliver Stone will present W., his disappointingly uncontroversial biopic of the American President George W Bush. The great character actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, will also be at the screening.

Of the big American films, the Venice Golden Lion winner The Wrestler is a must-see. Starring Mickey Rourke as an ageing wrestler who had his heyday in the 1980s, it’s packed with terrific performances.

Festival prizes don’t come bigger than Cannes’ Palme D’or, and showing in the Cinema of the World programme is this year’s winner, Laurent Cantet’s The Class. It is an audacious account of the life of a new schoolteacher in an inner-city Parisian school. Steve McQueen also won a prize at Cannes for Hunger, his artistic essay on the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Michael Fassbender is a revelation in the lead role. More disappointing are Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness; Michael Winterbottom’s study on grief, Genova; and Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq drama The Hurt Locker.

Fans of Asian-American cinema should watch Bengali Sadik Ahmed’s curry western The Last Thakur; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s family drama Tokyo Sonata; Three Monkeys, an understated political thriller from the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylon; as well as the Iranian comedy The Song of Sparrow, directed by Majid Majidi.

But it’s the Arabian films that really give DIFF its unique character this year. I was lucky enough to have the Palestinian director Najwa Najjar show me a rough cut of her excellent debut feature film, Pomegranates and Myrrh, which is receiving its world premiere in the Arabian Nights section. Starring Yasmine Al Masri (Caramel), Ali Suleiman and Hiam Abbas (both of Paradise Now), it’s a tale detailing how a wife struggles to cope with her husband’s imprisonment.

Two films that premiered at Cannes are vying for the prestigious Muhr Arabic feature award. The Lebanese co-directors and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Je Veux Voir (I Want to See) is a fictional documentary in which the French legend Catherine Deneuve asks to see the devastation caused by the 2006 Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon. Anne Marie Jacir’s Salt of the Sea is about a young Palestinian woman brought up in the West who returns to her homeland and demands restitution for land taken from her forefathers. Inspired by a real-life bank robbery, it’s a delightful mix of drama, youthful exuberance and comedy.

No film vying for the Arab feature award has a better title than Days of Boredom, Abdellatif Abdelhamid’s 1958-set Golan Heights drama. Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche’s Dernier Marquis is a provocative drama set in and around the politics of a Parisian mosque. Abbas Fahdel’s Dawn of the World is a counterpoint to The Hurt Locker in that it’s a tale set around the Gulf war, told from an Iraqi perspective.

War and its aftermath feature heavily in the Muhr Arabic documentary section, with Iraqi Kasim Abid’s Life After the Fall, the Lebanese director Samir Abdallah’s After the War, Dalila Ennadre’s Indo-China-set I Loved So Much, Maysoon Pachachi’s Open Shutter’s Iraq and Hannah Musleh’s Memory of a Cactus: A Story of Three Palestinian Villages all competing.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. At the DIFF this year, there really is something for everyone.