“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It’s no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.” ― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

There definitely is something deeply cinematic about Abu Dhabi; all is staged, propped up, rehearsed for gullible visitors striving for some exoticism to take-away. It just takes a drive to be propelled into a post-apocalyptic set where luxury instead of social decay has finally triumphed. Magic as in Méliès turned the pre-industrial desert into a concrete oasis of property development, where man does not need to travel to space anymore for the absence of historical gravity delivers the ultimate bliss. Opulence becomes essential and unconditioned air undesirable in this timeless pilgrimage to the holy land of consumerism.

As the Debord-ian mantra goes, “the spectacle is capital/oil accumulated to the point it becomes images”. Art, as in ARTificial, is the cultural matrix of the city: what better place to host a film festival than Abu Dhabi? When only the blinding lights of fiction are left illuminating a manufactured environment, perhaps cinema can undertake the surreal task of inventing reality.

By Celluloid Liberation Front