The Circuit

by Stephen Garrett
The Dubai International Film Festival should be rightly proud of its slogan, "Bridging Cultures. Meeting Minds." As the event wrapped up its 4th edition over the weekend, evidence of the credo was in abundance, most obviously in a generous international programming slate that unspooled everything from Joel and Ethan Coen's Oscar hopeful "No Country for Old Men" to South Korean auteur Im Kwon-taek's "Chun-Nyun-Hack."
 
Most relevant to the region, though, were the films competing for the Muhr Awards for Excellence in Arab Cinema, which lauded Philippe Aractingi's "Under the Bombs" for both best film and best actress. The film, which stars Nada Abou Farhat as a Shi'ite Muslim divorcée from Dubai who searches southern Lebanon for her missing son and finds herself falling in love with a Christian taxi driver, may have been Middle Eastern through and through. But the message of religious tolerance was a meeting of minds (and faiths) that epitomized the festival's mandate.
 
All film festivals have a financial incentive, whether it be to boost tourism or energize a local film industry, and DIFF's business-savvy city made sure to put money first and center. Among the handful of major sponsors were Dubai Duty Free, Dubai International Financial Centre and the credit-card company Dubai First (touting its "Royale" premium category, which has an actual diamond embedded into the card). If movies were the main priority in the hearts and minds of Emiratis this week, shopping must have been a very close second.
 
Then again, consumerism is at the core of all multiculturalism, as Brazilian author Poulo Coelho explained at Friday's Cultural Bridge Panel. "Bridges were built for traders," he said in his keynote address. "They brought merchandise, but they also brought the soul of their culture."
 
The panel pointed to international co-productions such as "Blindness," which fellow panelist Danny Glover just finished shooting, as the epitome of such soulful cross-pollination. Here is a book by Portuguese author José Saramago being adapted by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles and starring a cast that includes Americans, Canadians and Japanese. The subject itself, a epidemic of vision loss, speaks to the panel's topic. "What kind of relationships do people create when they lose their sight?" said Glover. "It's a metaphor for what we need to do in the 21st century."
 
Another of DIFF's initiatives to bridge culture is its trio of Lifetime Achievement Awards, given to a representative of Western cinema, of Eastern cinema and of Arab cinema. This year's recipients, Glover, Im and Egyptian director Youssef Chahine (who was too frail to travel from Cairo), were both self-effacing of themselves and effusive about each other during Saturday afternoon's press conference.
 
Im, in being recognized for his 100 films, joked modestly, "I look back and I wish that I could throw away about 50 of those films I made as a young man." Glover, for his part, was just humbled to be in such august company, having been a fan of Im's since seeing him honored eight years ago at the Telluride Film Festival and an admirer of Chahine's for more than twenty years. When asked if he would ever consider being in a film by the Egyptian, Glover replied, "I have no plans - but if asked, I would pay for my own ticket."
 
Not all of DIFF's events were so sweetly respectful. A last-minute change in the outdoor concert series "Rhythm and Reels" added a visit from the Axis of Evil comedy tour, an Arab-American comedy trio who has been bringing their stateside ethnic humor to cities all over the Middle East. "Sorry this show started late," said Egyptian-American comic Ahmed Ahmed after keeping the Foster's-swigging ampitheater audience waiting happily for an hour. "But we're on A.S.T.: Arab Standard Time."
 
There's something jolting about watching a comic work an Arabic crowd for laughs ("Any people from Jordan? Yeah? What about Kuwait? Hey you Pakistanis and Indians - can you just make peace already?") But even stranger was seeing South Korean comic Wan-Ho Chung start his act by belting an Arabic song before launching into a full stand-up routine speaking the local tongue fluently (Chung learned it growing up in Jordan). The United States may be the great American melting pot, but the boomtown of Dubai has its own special way of bridging that culture gap.


Stephen Garrett is a freelance film journalist who contributes regularly to Time Out New York and Esquire magazine. He is also the co-founder of Kinetic Trailerworks, a New York-based marketing company specializing in movie trailers for independent, foreign and  documentary films. Recent campaigns include 2006's Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film, "The Lives of Others," as well as the Oscar-nominated "Half-Nelson" and the Sundance Award-winning "No End in Sight."