ADFF buzz: Celebrities and Cuban rhythms at Emirates Palaces opening night party

If music be the food of love, play on, as William Shakespeare once famously said. And so it was with the opening night of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

We entered the Emirates Palace Hotel to be greeted by a classical quartet in the lobby, then continued to the opening night party where a Latino band were knocking out revolutionary favourites such as the unofficial Cuban national anthem Guantanamera, later to be replace by a DJ delving into the realms of Dubstep.

We won’t say who was shaking to the riddims on display, but many local, and global celebrities were in attendance, including the Emirati filmmakers Nayla Al Khaja and Khaled Al Mahmood, British-Yemeni playwright and director Bader Bin Hirsi, the Mauritian film director Abderrahmane Sissako, and the unfathomably beautiful Carmen (granddaughter of Charlie) Chaplin, looking resplendent in a dress I would say something about if only I knew anything about dresses.

The strange thing, though, was the way the music mirrored the more official part of the evening. The presentation preceding Ali Mostafa’s opening film from A to B featured a classical intro, seguing into Dubstep, while pretty much the first words Shadi Alfons’ character, Ramy, uttered on screen were “Che Guevara.”

A cunning piece of classical/dubstep/revolutionary folk music multi-media cross pollonisation, or a coincidence?

We don’t know yet, but we’ll be asking the organisers.