Small nations, big budgets: UAE narrative feature filmmaking
Dale Hudson
New York University Abu Dhabi
Kuwaiti and Bahraini art films appeared in international film festivals during the 1970s and 1990s, but it was not for another few decades that Arab Gulf would register to international audiences, often as foreign locations in Hollywood and Bollywood films. Less apparent outside the Gulf, khaleeji filmmakers exhibit short and feature-length films alongside ones from Algeria, Egypt, India, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Pakistan, and Syria at international film festivals in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Short film competitions contributed to the development of a new generation of Emirati filmmakers who have produced more than thirty narrative and documentary features that complicate our sense of “Arab” or “Middle Eastern” cinemas. This paper examines developments in feature filmmaking over the past decade. The confluence of “small nations” and “big budgets” fuels suspicions comparable to ones about the rapid development and ascendency on international markets of the cities of the Arabian Gulf, but it also reaches back to earlier historical moments before the violent disruption of European colonialism and U.S. imperialism. Films such as Ali F. Mostafa’s City of Life (2009) and From A to B (2014), Nawaf Al Janahi’s Al Dayra/The Circle (2009) and Dhil al Bahr/Sea Shadow (2011), Saeed Saleen Al-Murry’s Thawb al-Shams/Sun Dress (2010) and Sayer Al Jannah/Going to Heaven (2015), Majid Al Ansari’s Zinzana (2015), and Humaid Al Suwaidi’s Abdulla (2015) acknowledge the complex overlapping of postcolonial and neoliberal forms of globalization that affect the UAE. With small local markets and large financial resources, Emirati filmmaking has more affinities with filmmaking in Singapore and New Zealand than with Morocco or Palestine. However, it also concerns itself with the everyday practices of national identity in relation to historical marginalization within the Arab World and to cultural submersion by South Asian, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, African, and white expatriates. Adopting a comparative framework, the paper finds that Emirati filmmaking negotiates the competing demands of national, regional, and global identity in ways that can help us to rethink media after globalization.