Gulf directions

The UAE now has a handful film events - chief among them the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi and the Dubai International Film Festival in Dubai - that make a point of showcasing Gulf talent. GCC cineastes get their own enclaves: the Emirates Film Competition at MEIFF and Gulf Voices at DIFF are both devoted to airing their work. All the same, in the commotion of the international competitions, it can be hard to get a full sense of the state of Arab film. The strength of these big festivals is their breadth: they're generous buffets where one can find mouthwatering contributions from Patagonia and St Petersburg laid out alongside Hollywood and Bollywood confections.

The Gulf Film Festival offers a different bill of fare. Now in its second year, the Dubai festival furnishes viewers with a carefully laid banquet of Arab cinema, inviting contributions from across the Gulf region. Its strength is depth: by the end of its six-day run, one ought to have a fair sense of how cinema is developing at every level across the GCC and beyond, from established feature makers to emerging student talent.

Whether one is interested in Iraqi documentaries or Emirati horror flicks, the Gulf Film Festival provides, and bountifully so. As a bonus, there's even an international programme of shorts featuring work from Canada to Romania. And there's a special crash course in India's independent short filmmaking scene, plus a panel discussion comprising some of the subcontinent's leading filmmakers and critics: Kiran V Shantaram, Sudhir Nandgaonkar, Anand Gandhi and others.

Still, the Arab world is what this show is all about. In the words of Masoud Amrallah, the festival's director: "One of the things we are pushing is to give everyone the chance to find original stories and not just keep one image of the Gulf's people." The multitude of different stories and voices on display ought to make any such stereotyped thinking impossible. To help make sense of this profusion, here's a rundown of the expected highlights of the festival, region by region.

With numerous submissions in every film category, the UAE dominates the festival programme. There are dozens of short films in and out of competition. A standout looks to be Mustafa Abbas's Rain, in which an innocent man is framed for murder. Documentaries cover everything from the variety of nationalities represented in the UAE to the appeal of BMX biking. However, a pair of feature-length pieces look set to make the biggest waves. Ali Shah Hatami's Sound of Life has a notably charming set up: it tells the story of a young boy who wants to travel from Ras al Khaimah to Dubai to see the latest Harry Potter film and still make it home in time for his job at the local mosque. Complications, you may be sure, ensue - but not half so gruesomely as they do in Maher al Khaja's The Fifth Chamber (Ouija in Arabic). When the Abu Fares family move into their new home, they are disturbed by a series of ghostly occurrences. Their children stumble on a secret room where they discover a cache of occult artefacts, including an Ouija board. That's when things really get awkward. The premise alone evokes that sleepwalking-into-catastrophe atmosphere native to the best horror. For the stout-hearted, it ought to be worth a look.

Two additional Emirati features are showing in the non-competing Lights segment of the programme. Both sound intriguing in an off-kilter, Sam Shepard sort of way. In Al Dayra by Nawaf al Janahi, a poet-turned-journalist manages to capture a thief as he burgles a neighbour's house, only to find himself trading lives with his prisoner. And in Henna, by the writer-director-actor Saleh Karama, a young girl living in Ras al Khaimah tries to help her Bedu uncle recover some camels from a group of light-fingered youths. The animals were once a commonplace sight in the emirate, but in the fast-changing lives of this band of hoodlums, the film suggests, they present an irresistible novelty.

Judging by the 16 films that Kuwait is bringing to the festival, its film industry is in pretty rude health. Madness, grief and ennui are the key notes for this extravagantly dark line-up. Still, bright ideas can compensate for a gloomy outlook and the pitches for several of these films contain these in abundance. Abdullah al Qallaf and Abdullah Awadh each tackle universal contemporary anxieties in Technology Addiction and Tedium, respectively. In the former, a mother is disturbed when her husband and child become a little too absorbed in their consumer appliances. In the latter, Awadh discusses the crushing futility of life as a cubicle monkey.

Things get bleaker still in Tarek al Zamel's Human Remains, in which a former prisoner of war returns to his hometown only to find that his former love has married an obnoxious bully. The mood bottoms out in Laila Marafie's Mama, in which a mother attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of her children's murder. If this all sounds too much to bear, there's always Naked Human, an animated philosophical adventure in which the special-effects wizard Omar al Masab explores the evolution of human knowledge. Admittedly, this topic may also lend itself to a pessimistic treatment. The film is the second instalment in a trilogy.

It seems reasonable to expect that a high point of the Kuwaiti programme will be When the People Spoke, Part Three. This feature-length documentary continues Amer Alzuhair's historical study of parliamentary politics in his homeland. Part two won outright in the GFF's documentary competition last year. This latest instalment examines the ways in which the 2005 extension of suffrage to women played out in a series of electoral campaigns.

Gender roles are also submitted to scrutiny - albeit of a quirkier sort - in Wa Waila by the director Monira al Qadiri. Based on a Kuwaiti folk song and boasting the attendant folk-narrative themes of love, loss and exile, Qadiri's short film is cross cast so that male roles are played by female actors and vice versa. This is a common enough device in western theatre, though it's rare in film. Combined with the folk elements and with the help of al Qadiri's reputation as a visual artist of some repute, the piece should be something special.

It may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that independent film still survives north-west of the Gulf. And it may be more surprising still to learn that stunt motorcycling - proper Evel Knievel stuff - is flourishing in Baghdad. Luay Fadhel's documentary on the subject, See Them, ought to make truly nail-biting viewing. And there are further insights into the way life battles on in Mounaf Shaker's Red Zone Citizens. This factual short depicts a group of young actors who set up a theatre company in one of Baghdad's most dangerous quarters. It also suggests a revision to the idea that simply addressing a roomful of people is the scariest thing one can do.

However, among the dozen or so other films that are coming from the Iraqi contingent, the biggest looks to be L'Aube du Monde, a French co-production from the writer-director Abbas Fahdel. It tells the story of a young couple whose wedding is followed immediately by the outbreak of the first Gulf War. The husband goes off to fight and is killed in action, though not before he makes his best friend promise to take care of his soon-to-be widow. The stage is set for a faltering romance of the utmost poignancy. The screenplay won the Grand Prix from the French Centre National de la Cinematographie. Oh, and the film stars Karim Saleh, of Munich and Kingdom of Heaven fame. It features a soundtrack by Jurgen Knieper, best known for scoring Wings of Desire for Wim Wenders. An impressive team, then.

Of the UAE's nearest neighbours, Saudi is the biggest hitter with 30 or so entries to the festival - not bad for a country whose home-grown film industry only really took off in 2006. Its standouts are likely to be Waleed Osman and Fawaz Gadri's The Revenge, a noirish melodrama in which four brothers discover a bag belonging to a local gangster. The crook comes to reclaim his property and internecine nastiness quickly ensues.

Meanwhile, there's an intriguing short from the award-winning director Sameer Arif, which is in competition and will screen as part of the opening night's programme. Eyes Without Soul is a poetic sketch posing the question of how to see the world as another sees it, especially if that other seems to lack a spiritual dimension. The premise may be a bit inscrutable, but Arif won a lot of praise for his previous effort, Hard Way, which screened at Cannes. And another film of his, Just a Word, is running out of competition in the festival's Lights section: it tells the story of a young boy who returns to Saudi from New York and has to to wrestle with the Arabic language. His track record affords him the benefit of the doubt.

Oman, too, has a short history in filmmaking. Its first major home-grown effort was 2006's Al-Boom. But its three shorts in the Gulf festival cover an impressive breadth of territory. Al-Motasim al Shaqsi's Al Qant takes us into the realms of the supernatural when a group of children investigate voices coming from an abandoned house. Jasim Albatashe's film Raheel treats the tension between a desire for freedom and the need for stability. And Dawood and Yasir al Kiyumi's Discover Your Power uses the duo's punchy, commercial style to urge the development of individual potential. Their previous effort, Reality Beats, was one of the highlights of the Dubai International Film Festival's Gulf Voices programme, so this should be worth a look.

Yemen has everything riding on just one short, the inauspiciously titled The Loser Bet. Fadhel al Olafi's film, which is not actually in competition, depicts the way that extremist organisations use religious pretexts to dupe young people into subversive acts. Finally, Qatar's two submissions to the festival were both made by Hafiz Ali Ali, and both take a slightly meta view of the art of narrative. In Scent of Shadows, Ali Ali offers a history of Qatari cinema from the first open air projectors set up by British oil companies to the establishment of a national picturehouse. And his longish film Gharanguoo depicts a troop of gaily-attired children visiting their grandmother's house on the 14th day of Ramadan. They are enchanted by her memories of the festive customs of the season. Story and celebration merge into one in this film for children.

Story and celebration: these might as well be the watchwords for the festival as a whole.
elake@thenational.ae The Gulf Film Festival runs until April 15. For more details see www.gulffilmfest.com