Dubai Film Festival Day 2

More film reviews, still no star sightings (if you don't count the lead actors of 'The Hero').

Another day spent at the Mall of the Emirates, not to shop, though, but to cram in as many movies as possible. Donna kept me company, so it wasn't just me and a Starbucks frappuchino during the breaks.

The first two films of the day were pretty intense, while the third was incredibly funny and encouraging. They were set in Lebanon, Angola and Turkey respectively. Hoorah for cheap film making technologies that bring the World to us!

'Massaker' is a documentary of interviews deconstructing 'individual and collective violence', according to the director. It was filmed by a Beirut-based German team who miraculously managed to find 6 of the military perpetrators of the Sabra and Shabila refugee camp massacres during the Lebanese civil war. Amazingly they got these men to speak about their training, which took place partly in Israel, their preparation and reasoning and the attack on the two villages. It was visually relentless, mainly because the device they used to assure anonymity for the interviewees was extreme close-ups on hands, shoulders, knees and other parts of the body, avoiding faces, which were also kept in the dark. According to the director this film was not meant to be a reconstruction of this specific massacre, so there was very little visual information about the events: all descriptions came from the speakers apart from some stills which were shown to the interviewees to elicit their comments. The viewing experience was deeply disturbing and focussed on those voices calmly describing unspeakable events.

'The Hero' is a first feature film for Angolan director Zeze Gamboa. It is a 'City of God'-esque story of a street kid in search of his father lost in the Angolan war; a veteran of that war who lost a leg to a land mine and tries to get back into peaceful society; and the kid's teacher. Filmed partly with amateur actors and partly with professionals, the narrative jumped between these people's attempts to re-create some normality in a land recently recovering from 20 years of war. One of the most poignant moments was a scene in a public square where children and adults queue up for the opportunity to speak to camera searching for lost relatives, to be broadcast on public television, an initiative to re-unite families torn apart by the fighting.

'The Play' was an entirely lighter and funnier experience. A documentary following a group of village women in rural Turkey who are determined to stage a play about their lives to the rest of the community. They tell their stories to the headmaster of the local school who scripts them into a play for them to rehearse. From an opportunity to do something away from the daily drudge the rehearsals become a forum for the women to open up about their personal histories, from drunk husbands to forced marriages, from lack of schooling to elopements, from mean mother-in-laws to lack of healthcare.

Top film today: 'The Play', by a long shot, because the characters were so much larger than life.

Dubai International Film Festival Opens

It opened yesterday, actually, with a gala showing of Palestinian film 'Paradise Now', but I wasn't invited to that, of course.

Laurence Fishburne was, though, and Morgan Freeman was back, as well as assorted Hollywood, Bollywood and Arabian film stars. The festival lasts till December 17th and most films are shown either at Mall of the Emirates or the Madinat Jumeirah. I have tickets for 19 movies, so will be living at the local Starbucks in the Mall of the Emirates between movies. I expect my diet to get even worse than it normally is.

Todays films have been 'From Dust', about the aftermath of the Tsunami on Sri Lanka's fishermen; 'An Ordinary Day', a fiction short; 'Under a Desert Sun', a collection of sequences from a nature series about the desert; 'Shooting Dogs', set in Rwanda during the genocide; and 'The Axe', a French black comedy.

'From Dust' is a rough and ready documentary filmed on mini-DV over most of this year. The director/camera operator went there in January to capture a story of how people re-build their lives only to find himself without a crew, having to teach his Tuk-Tuk driver to become his sound man and living with people who were not actually able to re-build their lives because of government policies and inefficiency. Soon after the Tsunami struck the Ministry for Tourism realised that by creating a 100 meter exclusion zone for re-building for local residents they could claim valuable coastal lands to sell to international developers for tourism projects, even if that meant that people who had lived there (and some of whom needed to live near the sea, being fishermen) were made homeless. The film follows a few young men struggling with red tape and empty promises who try to be re-located or re-build, as well as an Australian acupuncturist who travels the coast trying to organise new housing for families.

'An Ordinary Day' won best short at this year's Abu Dhabi film competition. It was snappy and looked good, with the clever idea of being non-verbal, thus broadening its potential audience, but I felt that the initially straightforward story of a man who, while minding his own business in a cafe, suddenly sees lots of people who look just like him everywhere around him, got a bit lost when he is suddenly transported to roam the desert until he falls over from exhaustion. The titles were cool, though, with nifty animations based around the debris on the cafe table.

'Under a Desert Sun' is a collection of sequences culled from a nature programme about the environment of the Arabian Peninsula. It focusses on the conservation efforts being made to rescue the Arabian oryx and local variants of the gazelle from extinction. It documents the efforts of the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and other countries to take the fast disappearing animals from their natural habitats to breed them in safety at wildlife centres before attempting to re-introduce them back into the wild. This last step has been thwarted over and over again as the main threats to the animals survival, poaching and human encroachment onto their natural habitat, can't be prevented from endangering them again. While the film itself was mildly critical of the fact that there seems to be little official will to stop poaching, as some of the demand for animals (they are captured live for private zoos) comes from very high levels of society indeed, I was gob-smacked to hear from the director in the Q&A session afterwards that some of the so-called eco-tourism hotels in the desert buy these animals from possibly illegal sources to use in their own 'wild habitats'. Oman actually has to guard its herds of oryx with armed rangers who trail the animals across the unfenced nature reserve.

'Shooting Dogs' is Michael Caton-Jones' (director of 'Scandal') latest offering, a fictionalised account of the events taking place in a Catholic school compound during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. An important subject, that has this year already been covered in 'Hotel Rwanda' (strange how there is nothing on a subject and then two films come along at once), this film is let down by the symbolic characters that turned the story into more of a series of tableaus than an engaging narrative. There was the wise Catholic priest, the naive NGO teacher, the jaded journalist and her hardcore camera man, the helpless UN commander, the promising black student, and fated pregnant woman, and so on. From his post-film talk it sounded as if it was a life-changing experience for Caton-Jones and his lead actor, who filmed on location in Rwanda and had a lot of help from their local crew and extras who had actually lived through the genocide. Their first-hand knowledge saved the film from too much cliché, as well as the director's attempt not to sensationalise the subject matter - "almost like a horror movie, where there is more tension because the monster isn't shown".

'The Ax' is a French black comedy directed by Costa-Gavras, of an unemployed man who attempts to get his dream job by killing any potential competition. It's smirky rather than hilarious, and I swear the lead actor is a re-incarnation of Jack Lemmon.

Best film so far: 'From Dust', for the directors persistence in the face of adversity.

That's it for today, more films tomorrow.

PS: You can download the complete festival guide with a description of all the films in the festival from the DIFF website. Very useful if you want to get an idea of what's new in Arab cinema.

Dubai Ski Club

Yes, you read correctly, we are now officially members of that elite group.

This week Dubai skislope finally opened, almost three months behind schedule. It's a 400 meter long indoor slope with 5 runs of varying difficulty, all attached to Dubai's newest and shiniest shopping centre, the Mall of the Emirates. Finally I will be able to learn to ski, and for the rest of my life, when asked where I learnt, be able to say: "Dubai, of course!"

Admittedly it is the most strange sight to see parents buying fleece gloves for their children and men in dishdash trying on big puffer jackets prior to hitting the piste. There was a very cute picture in the paper on the day of the opening of Sheikh Mo and his mates with warm hats and coats going up on the ski lifts.