A focus on female filmmakers at WOW Film Fair Middle East

On the set during the making of Emirati director Maitha Al Awadi’s film X. Courtesy Maitha Al Awadi

During the Academy Awards ­ceremony this week, much of the attention female filmmakers received was, as it is every year, focused on what they were wearing rather than their career achievements.

In 88 years of Oscar history, only four female filmmakers have been nominated for Best Director, and Kathryn Bigelow is the sole winner, for The Hurt Locker in 2010.

“This is a devastating travesty,” says Hermoine Macura, the chief executive of Dubai television company Straight Street Media. In an attempt to address the global movie industry’s gender imbalance, over the next six days the World of Women’s Cinema – WOW Film Fair Middle East will screen 31 short films by women in Vox Cinemas around the country.

This is the fourth edition of the festival Macura has brought to the UAE, and the gender imbalance is a subject the Australian feels passionately about.

“Women are oversexualised, misrepresented and misunderstood in movies,” she says. “Even when you do see an empowered woman, she’s not real, she’s a superhero. We need to change that narrative. There’s no shortage of talented female filmmakers out there, they just need a platform to shine.”

The WOW Film Fair started 20 years ago in Australia, and now has editions around the world.

“To enter, you either have to be female or have a female in your leadership team, and the story has to either have a lead female role or a female-focused gender ­narrative,” says Macura.

This year they received more than 100 entries, and Macura says her team was "inundated" with films directed by men. They include Refuge, about a migrant woman trying to survive the refugee crisis in Greece. The festival's opening movie is the 2011 feature film Sea Shadow, directed by Emirati Nawaf Al-­Janahi.

Four of the short films that will screen are Emirati-made. They include Sarah Hashmi's ­Lemonade, a documentary about a young Emirati man with autism, and Nujoom Al Ghanem's Sounds of the Sea, about a young boy and his teacher who revive an old pearl ­divers' song.

Macura says the festival always has a big focus on women’s health “because there’s not enough content created around that”.

Listen to Your Body is a stream of the health programme segment, on Saturday, which includes a short film Breast Friends, followed by a panel discussion on breast and ovarian cancer with leading Emirati doctors and health ­experts.

“They are real stories. They’re things that are happening – childbirth, cancer, injustice, leadership, moments of joy, and also creativity. The programme also has animation and fantasy, but with the hard-hitting films, I feel the feminine perspective makes these films so much more ­emotional and intense.”

Macura says it was tough at first to gain momentum for the festival. Government backing was secured in 2015, and corporate organisations started lending support last year. This year, she is also running the festival in Lebanon and Egypt. “Next year, we want to do more Arab counties – to take the message out there and get more entries in,” she says.

Emirati director Maitha Al Awadi, whose film X, about women's experience of love, is screening for the first time in the UAE as part of the festival, hopes to see more events supporting women in film.

“Cinema is a man-made industry, and most films still only have two or three stereotypical roles created for females,” says Awadi, a 27-year-old from Dubai. “Hopefully festivals like WOW will help to change how women are ­portrayed on the screen.”

Awadi, who shot X in United Kingdom last April, wanted to depict the ways in which women's relationships are differently to those of men.

“They encounter a man who they think is the perfect person and then in the middle of the relationship, they find out they’re not as perfect as they seem,” she says.

“I think men go through the same thing but it affects women more because of the emotional input they put into these relationships.”

• Films are showing at Vox Cinemas from tomorrow to Wednesday, on the rooftop at Galleria Mall in Jumeirah, and at Mall of the Emirates. Selected screenings are also taking place in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, see www.wowmiddleeast.com and www.voxcinemas.com for timings. Tickets from Dh30 – all profits go to the Al Jalila Foundation’s special-needs programme