10 years of Emirates Film Competition

The first film competition of the kind launched in the UAE became the center of attention not only in the country, but also in the Gulf Region (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia). Since the event started, Emirati films have gained more attention. This explains the increased intensity of competition, and the high expectations for this year’s festival.

The first round of the festival was held side by side with the Abu Dhabi book fair, to have a readily available audience who can also come to watch films for free. The organizers were betting to get 10 films; if they got it that would be excellent. Although just two hours before the deadline they received only 2 or 3 films! The idea to call it off and cancel everything was emerging. However, at the last minute of the deadline suddenly 90 films appeared!! In spite of 58 films screened in the first round, only 30 to 40 people came to fill the empty seats of a theater which was made for a 1000 viewers. But the following year it was not experimental anymore and the festival decided to go to the next level.

The Emirati film maker Nawaf Al Janahi (The Circle, 2009; Sea Shadow, 2011) remembered the early times, when the festival started and he was on the street passing leaflets to people, promoting the film festival, shouting “Emirati films!! Emirati films!!” However, before all that, the real birth of the competition was when three people sat on the table chit chatting and at the end of that day the idea of the Emirates Film Competition saw the light. Those people are now the film director Al Janahi; the director of Emirates Film Competition section at Abu Dhabi Film Festival Ali Al Jabri; Masoud Amr Allah Al Ali, the artistic director or Dubai International Film Festival. “The conversation was simply how we tell our society that we exist, and we thought that it was time to achieve that objective”, says Al Janahi.

One of the reasons EFC started was the film festival called “Arab Screen Independent Film Festival” already established in 1999 by the Libyan film director Mohammed Makhlof, which started in London before moving to Doha, Qatar. The good reputation of the festival extended to the entire Gulf Region countries where some Emirati film students successfully screened their films there. So the question was: why should Emirati directors go all the way to Qatar to screen their films? Why don’t they screen them here in Emirates?

Al Janahi recalls: “From that day the cinematic movement was born officially not only in the UAE but in the Gulf as a whole”. In the following years the EFC started to get things moving in neighboring countries and attracting more film makers to come and show their films, especially when the festival launched a new category in competition just for the Gulf Countries. That’s when the big buzz happened, which saw titles moving around and shown in colleges, universities and festivals. As the ADFF catalogue states: “In 2008 and 2009, the EFC was held alongside the Middle East International Film Festival, which was subsequently rebranded as the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) in 2010. That same year, the EFC joined ADFF’s other initiatives aimed at providing filmmakers from the Gulf and the entire Arab world with greater exposure.”

Al Janahi considers this step as the end of the status of Emirates Film Competition. “It’s not the same anymore in many aspects. When Dubai International Film Festival added a new rule that any film screened in Dubai should be a premiere not only in UAE but in the entire Gulf, that killed the movement”. Then he adds: “Ten years ago the strength of the EFC was the uniqueness of it because it was the first and the only festival in the country. Every year there were many films, more audiences and a lot of guests coming from abroad to attend it and you could watch all the films. Nevertheless today’s strength is the international spotlight that the selected Emirati films gain from ADFF. Yet it’s not anymore the same amount of films being put together like in the old days”.

The challenge that faced Emirati films was funding at first, although now with new government organizations such as TwoFour54, it shows that making films becomes possible and approachable, by both amateurs and professionals. From ten years till now, it has become harder to get films selected in competition, which raises the bar of challenges local film makers are facing. All in all, a lot of positive points have to be mentioned about the new films, for, at the end of the day, the festival projects decent movies of good quality.

By Ali Shujaa Al Afeefi