‘Miss Sloane’ gives DIFF solid start – Nasrallah cooks up comedy with political overtones

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DUBAI, UAE, Dec 8, (RTRS): The 13th Dubai Intl Film Festival kicked off Wednesday with Samuel L. Jackson receiving a career award from Sheikh Mansoor bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the son of Dubai’s ruler, before tense US political thriller “Miss Sloane” opened the fest with director John Madden in tow.

“I have already campaigned to come back and work in this country,” Jackson said after being greeted with a standing ovation. “Anybody out there who has got a job for a brother, let me know! Anytime you need me, call me. I will see if I can get here,” he added. “Maybe one of my films will be screening here next year.” He will be holding an onstage conversation on Friday.

Also feted with career nods during the opening ceremony were mono-monikered Bollywood star Rekha, and Oscar-winning French-Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared (“The English Patient”).

Other top international and regional talents sighted strutting down the Madinat Arena red carpet included “Fast and Furious” thesp Tyrese Gibson; Bond girl Olga Kurylenko; Egyptian satirist Bassam Youssef, known as the Jon Stewart of the Arab World; Bollywood stars Ranveer Sing and Vaani Kapoor, in town for the world premiere Thursday of Paris-set Hindi romancer “Befikre”; and Emirati director Ali F Mostafa, whose dystopian thriller “The Worthy” will be having it’s Middle East bow.

DIFF chairman Abdulhamid Juma in his opening remarks noted “the wonderful coincidence” that there are 13 Emirati films screening at the fest’s 13 edition, six of which are features. It’s an indication that the local industry, built from scratch concurrently with the festival, is starting to get some traction.

Films in 40 languages from 55 countries are screening, more than 70 of which are Middle East premiers.

The fest has assembled what looks on paper like a rich Arabic lineup complemented by the cream of the international circuit crop, including US awards hopefuls such as “La La Land,” “Nocturnal Animals,” and “Manchester by the Sea.”

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” which is launching from Dubai into the Middle East, will close the fest on Dec 14.

Yousry Nasrallah is one of Egypt’s most highly regarded filmmakers, know for depicting his country’s social and political complexities in multi-layered movies such as “Gate of the Sun” (2004), “Aquarium” (2008) and “After the Battle” (2012) which was a meditation on the Tahrir Square revolution. His latest, “Brooks, Meadows and Beautiful Faces,” which screens in Dubai’s Arabian Nights section, after launching in Locarno and Toronto, is a comedy about a family of cooks preparing a wedding feast in a small Egyptian village. Nasrallah also heads the fest’s main jury. He spoke to Variety about his transition towards making seemingly lighter fare in what are dark times for Egyptian audiences.

Political

The tagline for this film is: “You don’t need politics to make a political film… Love, pleasure, beauty and food are serious enough.” It’s clearly more than a bucolic culinary romp.

In 1999 I made a documentary called “On Boys, Girls and the Veil.” The lead character was the actor Bassem Samra (who appears in many of Nasrallah’s films, including in “Brooks”) who then introduced me to his family in the countryside. They fascinated me. They were cooks, they were very lecherous and lots of fun. They had a relationship to life that I liked. So I started writing the script, but it was too political. It was a time (before the revolution) when politics were monopolised by the state and film directors felt compelled to make political films. But it was not my intention to make a political movie, so I put it aside. And every time I finished a film I would pick up the script, and then put it aside once again. Then recently I decided to do it precisely because I felt there wasn’t much left to say, politically, about how bad the situation in Egypt is. And that I needed to go back to certain fundamental things. You know the three basic things that mobilised people in the 2011 revolution were: bread, freedom, and dignity. That’s what this film is about!

Tell me about working with Ahmed Abdallah, who is known as a hit-making screenwriter in Egypt.

Yes, he is a very commercial screenwriter. He did a few films which I really liked. One was “Elfarrah” (“The Wedding”). But I don’t think in terms of working with commercial or non commercial writers. It’s about intelligence and talent. He’s good at dealing with a multitude of characters. His contribution to this particular project was basically writing dialogues and discussing the last section of the film with me, which I changed. He’s funny, he has that sense of repartee. It was fun working with him. But most of the script, including the wedding, I wrote myself. I’m a cook, so I know what I’m talking about when I deal with cooks.

For Arab auteurs being able to break out internationally and also have an audience in the Arab world seems to be particularly tough. Has this been an issue with you?

It was tough at the beginning, but I’ve been around for about thirty years now. Still I continue to contend with this. For example my 1993 film “Mercedes” — one of my most difficult works that travelled internationally, and was rejected locally when it came out –has become a cult movie of sorts these days in Egypt among young people, who really understand it.

A group of high-caliber American and British film executives have made the trek to the Dubai Film Market for the newly launched Dubai Investors Club where they will show the ropes and hobnob with Arab entrepreneurs who have grown weary of Hollywood seeing them as ATM machines for propositions known to have disastrous consequences.

“They’ve all heard these terrible stories,” says US producer Paul Miller, a former head of financing at the Doha Film Institute, who is organising the two-day, Dec 8 and 9, closed-doors event at the Madinat Jumeirah resort.

“The point is to say: ‘look, we are going to introduce you to the fundamentals of what film investment is and explain that it’s not about writing the check and just praying.” There are so many more sophisticated ways to invest in film,” he notes.

Up to 15 undisclosed top-level potential Arab investors will be walked through each step of the value chain, hearing about it directly from top industry people including Film Nation COO Milan Poleka; Voltage COO Jonathan Deckter; Studio Canal UK. Head of Production Jenny Burgers; and Tim O’Hair and Arcadiy Golubovich, partners in US production and film financing company Primeridian Entertainment.

Lauren Selig from Los Angeles-based Shake and Bake Productions will provide a personal case study. “She will talk about some movies where she put her own money in and others where she didn’t. It’s wonderful for these investors to hear from other investors who’ve taken the plunge,” says Miller

Cinetic CEO John Sloss and Sam Englebardt, who is Chief Strategy Officer of virtual reality entertainment company The Void will explain the dynamic of “what the producer is looking for and what the investor is looking for,” while John Hadity, Executive Vice President for EP Financial Solutions, will talk about risk mitigation.

High net worth individuals from the Arab world aren’t any different from those in any part of the world, Miller points out.

“They are pretty savvy people who made their money in some way by being smart about things…and yet they’ve all heard horror stories about how you can lose money by not being smart in dipping your toe in that water.” So the idea of this two-day event is really to say: “come, we know you are enthusiastic. We know you want to diversify your portfolio into what they call alternative asset classes.”

“I know from being out there that obviously there is a lot of money there, a lot of it wrapped up in real estate and some of the more blue chip stuff, but there’s thirst to get interested in film.”

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