REPORT
HOme Cinema As the curtain falls on the Abu Dhabi film Fest and Dubai’s offering is about to get under way, Edgar takes stock of the local filmmaking landscape by Matthew Priest
T
om Cruise’s vertigo-inducing climb up Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is arguably the most famous depiction of Dubai in the world of cinema. While it showed the rest of the world the startlingly impressive infrastructure that the city has built, for the UAE film industry it was the moment the penny dropped. In the two years that have passed the Dubai Film and TV Commission (DFTC) has facilitated many notable cinematic productions in the city – ranging from Hollywood to Bollywood and even Chinese-produced films – confirming the emirate’s growing status as a production location favoured by filmmakers around the world. But what of the local filmmakers? Where are the homegrown equivalents to Scorsese, Spielberg and Eastwood? “The idea of an Emirati filmmaker is still a relatively new one, and it is a perspective that people have rarely seen on the big screen,” says Mustafa Abbas an award-winning local filmmaker. “If we go back five or six years, there was a huge hunger to create a local film industry, but there were only a handful of us who were actually pushing to actually make films,” says Abbas, who at only 28 years old is already considered one of the forefathers of the UAE film industry. His short career has already seen him win praise for his low-budget independent short film 100 Miles and having another of his films The Alley screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. “Because Dubai is such an international city, it is a great platform for filmmakers. They can pretty much use it as a basis to tell the story of many different cultures. What is unique to a local filmmaker is that they can frame that story through the eyes of an Emirati, and that isn’t something that we have seen very much of.”
Jason Larkin/arabianEye/Corbis
‘‘The idea of an emirati filmmaker is relatively new. it is a perspective rarely seen on the big screen’’
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