Abu Dhabi unveils its autumn of culture

Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and the city's film festival have over the past week announced their line-up of acts and movies.

After months of speculation, Flash Entertainment broke cover last week to confirm three headline acts – Kanye West, Linkin Park and Prince – who will take to the main stage on Yas Island next month when the Formula 1 race returns to Abu Dhabi, bringing with it a weekend of motorsport and music.

Indeed, if the F1 season remains as competitive over its next three races as it has over the rest of the calendar, Abu Dhabi may yet stage the title-deciding finale it was denied last year, and Prince could close the weekend playing to a newly crowned king of the world’s most glamorous sport.

Having unveiled its cast of performers, Flash put an end to one of my favourite games of the summer – the one where you sit around trying to speculate which artists will be coming to the capital this year, conjuring up ever more fanciful names – and sparked an unseemly scramble for the few race tickets that remain on sale.

Flash is also teasing the prospect of further special guests to come – including, perhaps, someone to occupy the main stage on the vacant Thursday night slot which Beyoncé filled last year.

While the line-up for Yasalam Live stole most of the headlines last week, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (formerly the Middle East International Film Festival) also confirmed its own 10-day schedule, for an event which opens on Thursday at the Emirates Palace hotel.
Established in 2007, the film festival occupies a marginally less glitzy place than F1 on the entertainment calendar, but it is no less significant for that.

There is much to admire in the programme that Peter Scarlet, the festival’s executive director, and his team have put together. It includes Never Let Me Go, the big-screen adaptation of Kazou Ishiguoro’s novel about the paralysing effect of conformity, starring Keira Knightley, and Potiche, which pairs Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu in a Francois Ozon film about industrial strife at a provincial umbrella factory in France. These two international films are supported by an undercard of screenings that has been designed to delight, inspire and challenge in somewhere close to equal measures.

The serious business of the festival is to stimulate and develop the region’s filmmakers both informally, by bringing the best work from around the world to the capital, and formally, through the Sanad Fund, which offers cash grants and support to aspiring creatives.

It is an interesting venture. Sanad has $500,000 (Dh1.84m) available to help films get made in the first place, by offering development grants of up to $20,000 per project and, further, to polish them up once location work is completed, via post-production grants of up to $60,000 per project. Such awards are made available to filmmakers from more than 20 countries across the region.

The fund also offers what it describes as year-round support to the projects it sponsors, helping to "connect filmmakers to potential partners and audiences". To this end, Sanad will be hosting a series of creative workshops at the festival to help nurture new talent.
Meanwhile, five films on show this year – Here Comes The Rain; In My Mother's Arms; OK, Enough, Goodbye; Qarantina and Sun Dress – have already benefited from cash grants. It will be interesting to see how well each one fares in the territory which has, to some degree, supported its development.

Indeed, while the welcome arrival of Prince next month helps continue, in some small way, to remake Abu Dhabi as an entertainment centre, it is the less publicised work of bodies such as Sanad that will sustain the capital’s cultural ambitions and its creative industries in the years ahead. International stars may pass through but the pride of nations rests on the talent of their own people.