Did you realise that if you drive for just 45 minutes out of Abu Dhabi city, you might end up in Jeddah?
Not the Saudi city, of course – but a stunning, lifelike replica of a souq district as it would have looked in the 19th century.
The 5,800-square-metre recreation of a walled neighbourhood represents a huge leap forward in Abu Dhabi’s aspirations to becoming a key player in the international movie and TV industry.
It is the city’s first “backlot”, a collection purpose-built structures used to shoot exterior scenes for films and television shows.
What you find when you step inside this quaint little district, surrounded by desert in Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi (Kizad), is a ghost town with clues strewn around to the drama that took place there until early this month.
Spices and herbs lie untouched in boxes displayed in the doorway of the apothecary. Oil lamps, bundles of hay and sacks of grain are scattered around the pathways. A carriage once pulled by horses sits idle in the town square, as though waiting for its owner to return.
For six weeks, until May 10, the backlot was a hive of activity as it came to life for the shooting of Saudi drama Haret El Sheikh, the first historical drama of its kind ever filmed in Abu Dhabi.
The show is being made by broadcaster MBC’s production arm O3 Productions in collaboration with Abu Dhabi’s twofour54. The 30 episodes, each 40 minutes long, will be screened during Ramadan.
Abu Dhabi Film Commission’s location manager, Sameer Al Jaberi, hopes that the backlot will be used for many other historical TV shows and films.
“It’s an example of the ‘can-do’ Abu Dhabi attitude – that even if the location is not there, we can still build it and make this happen here,” he says.
“Abu Dhabi is becoming one of the first destinations that Arab production companies think of as a location. That’s how we attract all these projects – besides the 30-per-cent cash rebate, it is the variety of locations that we have, from the desert setting to the modern to the historical period, where we get to build the actual set.”
Al Jaberi shows me around the set’s winding, dusty streets, which took a team of craftsmen eight weeks to build. We pass by stalls with palm-frond shades and turquoise-coloured wooden shutters, and a mosque with a balcony on its wooden minaret for the muezzin to call worshippers to pray.
The set is not so different to the historical areas that still exist in Bur Dubai, Sharjah and Al Ain. Could production companies not use those existing areas for historical backdrops?
“When you build a set like this, you have more space and you don’t have any restrictions in terms of where you can work and what times,” explains Jaberi.
As we step outside the backlot, Jaberi points out a strip of sand where, during the shoot, several temporary cabins stood, containing production equipment, the costume and make-up departments and a large cafeteria.
There were also plenty of camels, donkeys and goats wandering around the set, to add to the historical authenticity.
The 60-plus actors involved in Haret El Sheikh are not done filming yet – they and director Al-Mothanna Sobah will be shooting interior scenes at twofour54's studio in Mussaffah until June 5, when the production is due to wrap-up.
One of those actors is Hassen Al Qorashi, who is also the production’s environment supervisor. His behind-the-scenes job has involved ensuring the set resembles 19th-century Jeddah as closely as possible.
Like most of the cast, Qorashi comes from Jeddah, and he explains that his own ancestors would once have lived in a neighbourhood similar from the one he has helped to create in Abu Dhabi.
“My aim was to capture the history of this period and convey it to the next generations, and I am really pleased with the results,” he says. He acknowledges that this was not easy.
“A lot of people had opposing opinions about what Jeddah would have looked like back then,” he says. “So my challenge was to gather solid evidence, based on my research, to get the approvals required.”
During the six months Qorashi spent researching the project, he and his sister, who has a PHD in history, travelled to Morocco to investigate the connection that existed at that time between the North-African country and Jeddah.
“The king of Morocco back then married his daughter to the sheikh in Jeddah, so there was a strong connection between the two places,” he says.
“We looked into how houses were built then, what people wore, their positions in society, and how they would have travelled. It was a hands-on experience and we used it also to develop the storylines.”
Al Qorashi is also an amateur chef, who was named one of the top 40 cooks on the TV show MasterChef Arabia two years ago. As such, he had a particular interest making sure the food used during shooting was authentic.
“We used real food – mostly fresh and dried fruit, rice, wheat and cereals, as they would have eaten back then,” he says. He also brought his own culinary creations for fellow cast members to enjoy between takes, including al kabsa (Saudi rice and chicken) – all cooked the traditional way.
artslife@thenational.ae
