Abu Dhabi has its own film festival, something we heard quite quickly once we knew we were moving here - it is a major point of pride for the emirate. What we didn't know was that the festival was taking place right below our future home. One movie theater is in Emirates Palace, just across the street (home of the camel burgers and camel lattes). The other is in Marina Mall, a pleasant stroll away now that the weather is easing up.
The festival is extraordinarily well-organized, with a website that far exceeds most Abu Dhabi websites in sophistication and organization. Every day of the festival, we can look up what movies are showing on a calendar that shows what's playing by time and by theater, and choose what we'd like to see given our schedules. Each movie screening concludes with a Q&A with the film's director and one or two prominent cast members.
Here's what we've seen so far, with our (highly subjective) reactions.
Cairo Drive - a fascinating documentary about driving in Cairo, that goes from 2009 (before the Arab Spring) up to Morsi's election. 77 minutes was a bit long, but it was worth the watch. The movie gives an insider's view into the crazy logic of excessive traffic that *just manages* to avoid total gridlock every day. It opens with a traffic cop gesturing at cars - because we're zoomed into his gestures, we don't see the logic of his directions, or the total havoc that he's attempting to organize. During the revolution, ordinary citizens took over his job, and would come out and bravely direct traffic for a few hours! The highlight of the movie for us was a marvelous shot of a baker bicycling through near-gridlock with huge trays of bread balanced on his head.
Belle - an English film, telling the story of a woman who was half-black in eighteenth-century English society, amidst the legal machinations surrounding the case of the Zong ship. The case was instrumental in accelerating abolition in England - a ship's crew cast diseased slaves overboard, claiming that the ship had insufficient water and had to ration scarce resources. In fact, they were hoping to force their insurers to recompense them in full. (Some people have argued recently that Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is actually all about the Zong case.) The movie was fun to watch, but a bit simplistic -- it made the abolitionist cause in England feel far, far more inevitable than it really was. One left wondering why the Brits ever trafficked in slaves at all, if all its citizens were so easily convinced of the abolitionist cause.
These Birds Walk - an occasionally beautiful, but mostly poorly shot and mystifying documentary, telling the story of runaways and orphans in Karachi. Abdul Edhi started a house for runaways long ago, and made caring for them his life's mission - the film shows him washing babies, chatting with toddlers, and so on. But the older children inside the house seemed largely unoccupied (one wondered, for example, if they received any education), and eager to re-find their families. The film also tracked ambulance drivers connected with the house, who collected and washed corpses from poor families, retrieved stray children, and restored them to their homes. It was a hard movie to watch, because (unlike Belle) there was no obvious "side" to be on -- we weren't convinced that Edhi's organization was actually doing any good -- and by the end of the film, the total impossibility of identifying any solutions to the crushing sense of lost-ness the children experienced was disabling for us as viewers. Though some children were returned home to sobbing mothers, others were clearly unwanted. And the children all showed obvious discomfort and dissatisfaction in the runaway house. They seemed trapped. But, unlike Cairo Drive, there was no metaphor threading through the film that gave voice to this sense of entrapment.
The festival is extraordinarily well-organized, with a website that far exceeds most Abu Dhabi websites in sophistication and organization. Every day of the festival, we can look up what movies are showing on a calendar that shows what's playing by time and by theater, and choose what we'd like to see given our schedules. Each movie screening concludes with a Q&A with the film's director and one or two prominent cast members.
Here's what we've seen so far, with our (highly subjective) reactions.
Cairo Drive - a fascinating documentary about driving in Cairo, that goes from 2009 (before the Arab Spring) up to Morsi's election. 77 minutes was a bit long, but it was worth the watch. The movie gives an insider's view into the crazy logic of excessive traffic that *just manages* to avoid total gridlock every day. It opens with a traffic cop gesturing at cars - because we're zoomed into his gestures, we don't see the logic of his directions, or the total havoc that he's attempting to organize. During the revolution, ordinary citizens took over his job, and would come out and bravely direct traffic for a few hours! The highlight of the movie for us was a marvelous shot of a baker bicycling through near-gridlock with huge trays of bread balanced on his head.
Belle - an English film, telling the story of a woman who was half-black in eighteenth-century English society, amidst the legal machinations surrounding the case of the Zong ship. The case was instrumental in accelerating abolition in England - a ship's crew cast diseased slaves overboard, claiming that the ship had insufficient water and had to ration scarce resources. In fact, they were hoping to force their insurers to recompense them in full. (Some people have argued recently that Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is actually all about the Zong case.) The movie was fun to watch, but a bit simplistic -- it made the abolitionist cause in England feel far, far more inevitable than it really was. One left wondering why the Brits ever trafficked in slaves at all, if all its citizens were so easily convinced of the abolitionist cause.
These Birds Walk - an occasionally beautiful, but mostly poorly shot and mystifying documentary, telling the story of runaways and orphans in Karachi. Abdul Edhi started a house for runaways long ago, and made caring for them his life's mission - the film shows him washing babies, chatting with toddlers, and so on. But the older children inside the house seemed largely unoccupied (one wondered, for example, if they received any education), and eager to re-find their families. The film also tracked ambulance drivers connected with the house, who collected and washed corpses from poor families, retrieved stray children, and restored them to their homes. It was a hard movie to watch, because (unlike Belle) there was no obvious "side" to be on -- we weren't convinced that Edhi's organization was actually doing any good -- and by the end of the film, the total impossibility of identifying any solutions to the crushing sense of lost-ness the children experienced was disabling for us as viewers. Though some children were returned home to sobbing mothers, others were clearly unwanted. And the children all showed obvious discomfort and dissatisfaction in the runaway house. They seemed trapped. But, unlike Cairo Drive, there was no metaphor threading through the film that gave voice to this sense of entrapment.
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