In the 1960s, when Mayor William Hartsfield branded my hometown “the city too busy to hate,” his commitment to business in a region famous for conflict elevated Atlanta to the forefront of the New South. Similarly, the Gulf States stand out in the Arab world as a place where prosperity trumps sectarianism, offering the compelling prospect of a modern-day Silk Road, a commercial but also cultural conduit that might become a nucleus of cooperation between the Middle East and the West.
When I recently spent a week watching movies at a film festival in Dubai, I didn’t especially embrace the city’s vibe, with its vast corporate compounds, endless mall culture, and expensive resorts. But many Westerners admire the Gulf States (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) for their financial prowess. And, despite some historical tensions, many contemporary Arabs, envying the Gulf’s success, admire these nations for having avoided the conflicts that have hampered other Middle Eastern societies—though Bahrain, last month, began to experience the revolutionary turmoil that is spreading across the Arab world. The region is well positioned to develop global connections on many fronts—politically and economically, but perhaps most valuably in the softer diplomacy of cultural engagement.
To put it bluntly, “we” don’t know “them” very well, and vice versa. We don’t have much appreciation or tolerance for each other’s histories, values, or perspectives; the Arab world and the West confront each other in stereotypes.
But better relations in the future seem promising as the Gulf States embark upon efforts to establish cultural and intellectual beachheads. Academic undertakings like Doha’s massive Education City and New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus represent one prominent part of this effort. Another is the kind of cultural programming presented at the Dubai International Film Festival. Seven years old, it’s the biggest in the region, joined by two others that began more recently: the Doha Tribeca Film Festival (run in collaboration with New York’s Tribeca Festival) and the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
The Middle East is developing a rich film culture, which offers opportunities for more equitable intercontinental connections. Compared with the one-way dynamics of another regional phenomenon, Western museum franchises (Guggenheim and Louvre outposts are under development in Abu Dhabi), film has a greater potential for reciprocity. As a medium, film resplendently promotes cultural identity and exchange.
But Arab films are a blip, if that, on our radar in the West, virtually invisible even in art houses and on Netflix. Granted that it’s a small industry compared with some other regional film movements; still, there’s a lot more going on here than we see on our screens. We should welcome this cinematic tradition into our multiplexes and film-studies syllabi, with a humanist conviction that disparate cultures can understand and appreciate one another through films in ways vastly preferable to the caricatured hostility now prevalent.
With unabashed boosterism, the Dubai festival, known as DIFF, promotes the diffusion of Middle Eastern film in a calculated enterprise to elbow its way onto the cultural stage as the Gulf has already succeeded at doing in the business world. In addition to the weeklong festival program, DIFF supports the regional film industry with networking, marketing, and financing workshops.
At present, there’s a minimal infrastructure for Middle Eastern filmmaking, which is why so many of the films shown at the festival were produced in conjunction with other, usually European, cosponsors. (Making a virtue of necessity, though, these transcultural productions create bridges toward that new Silk Road.) Arab filmmaking has historically been centered in Egypt, which produces about 30 feature-length titles a year. At the other extreme, according to materials distributed at the festival, only three feature films were produced in the United Arab Emirates in 2009; a total of 12 have been made in Jordan between 1958 and 2008, and 10 in Kuwait since 1968. Saudi Arabia has banned public cinema since 1980, though some Saudi films are distributed on television and DVD.
American academics are helping to nurture the talent and facilities for more-prolific Arab film production. The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts collaborated on a curriculum in Aqaba, Jordan, for the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts, which has just graduated its first class of 21 M.F.A.'s in production. At American University in Dubai, faculty from the University of Southern California have consulted on developing new programs for film, television, radio production, and screenwriting.
Film is a medium grounded in the West, especially America, which has probably complicated its accessibility to Middle Eastern filmmakers—especially if, as Neal Gabler argues in his 1988 history, “the Jews invented Hollywood.” And film has traditionally been hostile to Arab cultures. The titles of two scholarly books on Arabs in American cinema speak for themselves: Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, by Jack Shaheen, a professor emeritus of mass communication at Southern Illinois University (Olive Branch Press, 2001), and “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear, by the DePaul University law scholar Tim Jon Semmerling (University of Texas Press, 2006).
What Shaheen calls the “instant Ali Baba kit” is “a quick and easy assembly of the stereotypical Arab character in Hollywood": These kits feature “curved daggers, scimitars, magic lamps, giant feather fans, ... chadors, hijabs, belly dancers’ see-through pantaloons, veils, and jewels for their navels.” In the documentary based on his book, Shaheen calls Arabs “the most maligned group in the history of Hollywood. They’re portrayed basically as subhumans,” he argues. “All aspects of our culture project the Arab as villain.”
As politics and film reverberate, Shaheen explains, images of Arabs worsened in the wake of escalating Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, the 1970s oil embargoes, and the Iranian revolution. Semmerling describes American culture inflected by 9/11 and the Bush administration as “strongly bifurcated between good and evil,” where “the ‘evil’ Arabs and the Middle East have become our antithesis.”
But if control of the film camera has been historically elusive, taking hold of it becomes an empowering act of self-determination. I was struck by how conspicuously the films I saw—feature as well as documentary—foregrounded filmmakers and their cameras very self-consciously, as if giddy with the reality that they are now prolifically making movies and telling stories. The idea of filmmaking as a tool against oppression recalls a recent project by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem called Shooting Back, which “armed” Palestinians with video cameras to document abuses.
At the Dubai festival, the films resonated with postcolonial frustration and stultification. A legacy of conflict, both immediate and regional, often manifested itself as dysfunctional, troubled family relations symbolizing larger national disruptions. There was a recurrent sense of dispossession, displacement, and loss: frequent wandering, and leaving, and return, and then, often, departure again. Here, too, the titles tell the story: Fragments of a Lost Palestine; Leaving Baghdad; Cairo Exit; Transit Cities.
The narratives were usually sinuous: complicated, and becoming increasingly unresolved as the films unfolded, moving not toward closure but, rather, inconclusive angst. The intricacies of these repeated, interconnected, and unending stories evoked for me the aesthetic of Islamic design, with its geometric patterns that hypnotically interlock and overlap, radiating out in an infinite expansion. These narrative patterns reminded me also of the labyrinthine souks, the sinuous Arabic marketplaces. (And before I’m accused of Orientalist reductionism, I’ll add that most national film cultures can be similarly generalized through visual aesthetics—I’ve always felt that most Scandinavian films, for example, reiterate Munch’s The Scream.)
Two Iraqi documentaries, Baghdad Film School and The First Movie, especially highlight the sense of mission in Middle Eastern cinema (and both of them prominently fetishize the movie camera). In The First Movie, the Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins visited the Kurdish village of Goptapa, where the children had never seen movies. Like them, he had grown up in a world of bombs and wars—Belfast, in his case. Remembering that movies had made him feel safe, he brought a projector to show E.T. and The Red Balloon, and also distributed hand-sized cameras so the kids could make their own movies.
Like many films at DIFF, The First Movie reaches pointedly beyond received ideas and stereotypes. Wanting to displace “images of Iraq that we’ve seen in the media again and again,” Cousins hopes the children’s movies will offer different and more-beautiful impressions, and that their war-torn world will appear cinematically magical.
And there are, indeed, playful films about football games and silly fables, but when the children collect their families’ stories, they can’t escape horrible memories of the Anfal, the genocidal attacks from 1986 to 1989 in which 4,000 villages were gassed and bombed. The tragedy lingers even though it happened before these young filmmakers were born. Cousins came to Goptapa believing that the childish imagination was more powerful than war and could vanquish it; he left with this conceit somewhat tempered: “I now think that imagination and war fight each other.”
The Independent Film & Television College” featured in Baghdad Film School opened in 2004, closing in 2006 when a car bomb exploded in front of the school, but reopening, as the documentary shows, in 2009—with the faculty wearing bulletproof vests. The instructor Maysoon Pachachi explains, “We wanted to set up the first independent film school in a country where independent thinking had been banned for a long time. In a country like Iraq, which has been traumatized for millennia by occupations and invasions and so forth, the only thing that has stood in front of that is creative articulation, ... the making of something when the world is being unmade all around you.”
Its students are simply amazing, inspirational in their determination. Though some of their work isn’t much more sophisticated than a cellphone video, still they have faith that they are entering into the profession of cinematography. “I want an Oscar, now or later,” says one student. Most live in the “no go” areas of the city, where active militias and kidnappings are common. As they discuss film locations, they must grapple with the logistical dangers of war and the challenges of merely getting to class. “It’s clear that our movements in this chaotic place are very limited,” Pachachi says. “If we go out in the streets to film, we not only endanger ourselves but also the lives of other people.”
The teachers ask the students to document their lives. “Every Iraqi has a story,” a student says. “You could make a film about everyone.” For these students and their teachers, filmmaking is a way to stay sane, to stay alive, though bombs intrude pervasively; throughout the semester, their friends and members of their families are killed. (I can’t help thinking how pathetic this makes my own students’ dead-grandmother excuses. American students who watched this film would so much more greatly appreciate the luxury of their access to education.)
Several other films, too, revealed challenges that filmmakers face in creating honest, insightful accounts of the contemporary Arab world. Film permits for Cairo Exit were revoked (though filming continued anyway) because Egyptian authorities, citing national-security concerns, disapproved of the story of a Muslim young man who gets his Christian girlfriend pregnant. Abdallah al-Ghoul, director of Ticket From Azrael—about the young men who dig tunnels beneath the Gaza border—was unable to attend the screening of his film because he had just been arrested in Egypt. In My Father From Haifa, the writer/director Omar Shargawi shot one of the most striking scenes in Ben Gurion airport’s immigration-security area, as he accompanied his father back to visit the city he had fled during the 1948 nakba (“disaster,” as Palestinians refer to the Israeli expulsion of Arabs). Filming their entry to Israel with a hidden camera, Shargawi knew he risked imprisonment if he was caught.
Embracing political and social risks, telling gripping stories that push boundaries, these filmmakers are setting the foundation for a Middle Eastern society that’s more open both internally and toward the rest of the world. The array of themes include drug addiction in Iran (Salve and Please Do Not Disturb); sexual harassment (678) and incompetent treatment of mental patients (Zelal) in Egypt; Palestinians’ feelings of abandonment by the Arab world (in Shargawi’s film); and the aftermath of Iraqi totalitarianism from the anguished perspective of men who had stood with the tyrant (Leaving Baghdad and The Singer).
Even though I saw these films a few weeks before the anti-authoritarian uprisings began across the Middle East, they struck me as brimming with a sense of democracy and imminence—something different had to happen, and soon. The films embodied stories, passions, troubles, social critiques, welling up and straining to burst free, as if anticipating what has since begun to happen in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the Mideast. These films are a barometer of filmmakers’ and audiences’ determination to break through the stifling status quo that citizens across the Arab world have now begun to reject.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to find many of these films. A few from last year’s Dubai festival made the art-house and festival circuits, including Un Prophete (a French co-production, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the Academy Awards) and Amreeka; like many of the best films from this year’s program, both were about diasporas, and both were co-produced with Middle Eastern and Western support.
Many of this year’s films keenly deserve to “cross over": The Egyptian features Cairo Exit and 678; the Jordanian Transit Cities; the Lebanese Stray Bullet, set in the 1970s, about a woman trying to assert her independence (and resisting her forthcoming marriage) just as her world is collapsing amid the random violence of the country’s civil war; and, from Iran, Salve and The House Under the Water, another film about fractured families. That film opens with a shot of three boys playing in a lake, one of whom drowns. Thirty years later, the two survivors re-encounter each other. One is a criminal, implicated in yet another boy’s drowning death, and the other, the brother of the first drowned boy, is a police officer. It’s a poignant social allegory of a drowning society and the crushing weight of destiny. I’ll also endorse, along with My Father From Haifa, another excellent documentary, The Road to Bethlehem—again, both in part about filmmaking.
As a Jew who has always supported Israel but with some qualms about its human-rights record, I found every one of the Palestinian films I saw insightful (and my qualms have consequently grown significantly). One film, Gaza-Strophe, about Israel’s devastating Operation Cast Lead, struck me as overly polemical and propagandistic, but probably no more so than Western accounts must seem to Arabs. The Road to Bethlehem, about the hardships caused by Israel’s security wall around that city, is hard to watch without recalling the European ghettos that destroyed Jewish life in the 1940s.
Leaving the festival, one is persuaded that filmmaking in the Middle East is as important as it is difficult. As the instructor Kasim Abid says in his makeshift commencement address at the end of Baghdad Film School, speaking of the fundamentalists who wreak chaos:
“They have money and power, but they can’t make films. We have neither money nor power, but we can make films. ... Cinema can make our voices heard. It can ask questions. Questions about citizens and their rights. Their right to live. Cinema can help us understand one another.”
