Emirati director’s four-year struggle to make a film proves it’s not as easy as he thought

Though Jamal Luqman started the project with a nonchalant attitude, he concedes that making a film is a slightly bigger challenge than he anticipated.

Emirati film director Jalal Luqman, left, on the set of 40 Dirhams. Courtesy Jalal Luqman

Jalal Luqman is well-known to the UAE art community for his work and his Dubai gallery, Citizen E, and as co-founder of Abu Dhabi’s pioneering Ghaf Gallery.

Now, he hopes to make his mark on the film community, too, though his reasons might not endear him to many struggling filmmakers.

“I’ve been in the art field for a long time, and I wanted to get into the filmmaking thing, just to show that it’s not as big a deal as some people make it out to be,” he says.

If that angers any aspiring Scorseses, Luqman is unconcerned.

“I’ve had a habit of annoying people throughout my career, which is more than 30 years now, so it’s not something new to me,” he says with a laugh.

The result of Luqman's experiment is 40 Dirhams, a short, dark-comedy film about the power of money, which will be screened in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday night, after its premiere at his Dubai gallery in December.

Though he started the project with a nonchalant attitude, he concedes that his experience suggests that making a film is a slightly bigger challenge than he anticipated.

“We started it four years ago,” he says. “We ran into problems and everyone was saying he’ll never finish it – but we got there in the end. It wasn’t easy, but we got there. After doing that, I think I could make a film in a week now.

"It all started when I wrote a couple of stories, left them and didn't really think much more about them. Then, four years ago, I was approached by an agency that wanted to produce 40 Dirhams."

However, the unnamed agency – “I don’t want to annoy them any more than I already have,” says Luqman – then told him they wanted to rewrite the script.

“My feeling was, you came knocking on my door, not the other way round,” he says. “My credibility is established. You said you wanted this and now you want to change it? No. So it went nowhere.

“Then it got into my mind that I should make the movie anyway, just to spite them.”

So he did. A grant from the Abu Dhabi Music and Art Foundation was gobbled up in six months, so Luqman looked for a cast and crew who would work for “nearly nothing”.

The next hurdle was the introduction of compulsory national military service in 2014. His cast and crew included a large number of young Emiratis, and so another year was added to the film’s gestation period. The following year, Luqman finally finished his film. So he thought.

“Then the director of photography told me he couldn’t find the audio files,” he says. “I had to go back and shoot the whole film again.”

Version two went a little more smoothly, although Luqman had to assemble a mostly new cast and crew.

For an experiment that set out to prove making a film is no big deal, it seems to have taken a lot of effort – but he is undeterred.

“Of course I’d do it again,” he says. “I don’t care about the money or the success. If one person comes to this screening, then in my mind I’ve succeeded.

“I hope the film generates enough interest for someone to fund me to make more movies because I still have a lot of crazy in me.

“And, come on, we’re sick and tired of wars and religion and colour. We need to get silly and laugh together, and work out how we can come together to laugh and maybe fix the messed-up world a little bit.”

• 40 Dirhams screens at Manarat Al Saadiyat on Wednesday at 7pm. Entry is free and the film will be followed by a Q&A with the director and a screening of bloopers and out-takes