The second edition of Doha Film Institute's Qumra saw grantees from the Doha Film Institute (DFI), pitch their projects to a vast array of film industry delegates at the Museum of Islamic of Art in the Qatari capital. The filmmakers all hope to emulate the success of Theeb – which won writer-director Naji Abu Nowar a Bafta for Outstanding Debut – and Mustang, films that premiered at Venice and Cannes before eventually going on to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
The task for many of the delegates attending the series of breakfast meetings, masterclass events and works-in-progress screenings is to unearth the next Naji Abu Nowar or Deniz Gamze Ergüven.
The delegates invited include programmers from Cannes, Venice, and the Toronto film festivals. There are representatives from workshops in Torino, Istanbul, Copenhagen and Sundance labs, who look to take on projects and nurture them to fruition. Funders in attendance included representatives from SANAD, the development and Post-Production Fund of twofour54 in Abu Dhabi.
Sales agents and distributors from around the world arrived looking for projects to sign up. Netflix and the Sundance Channel were represented for the first time and the talk was of changing distribution models.
This is the second edition of Qumra and apart from the location, not much in the structure of the event has changed from last year. The philosophy of DFI chief executive Fatma Al Remaihi and artistic adviser Elia Suleiman seems to be, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The organisers also avoided the temptation to make the event any bigger, keeping the number of industry guests invited to around the 160 people mark. There was a mix of first time attendees and those invited to return. Qumra was also split, so that over the first three days, festival organisers and film workshop organisers were in attendance and over the final three days, sales agents and distributors doled out advice.
The days at Qumra followed a uniform pattern. They started at 9am with breakfast meetings. Four or five breakfast tables running concurrently and on each, there are a collective of industry delegates who talk about their field of expertise in the industry. These ranged from one in which media invitees spoke to the filmmakers about how to attract media attention for their films, to Image Nation Abu Dhabi and Gulf Film discussing the financing of international productions out of the Arab world.
There was a masterclass presented by one of the leading figures of the film world. What was remarkable about the lectures presented by American producer James Schamus, Cannes Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, renowned Japanese auteur Naomi Kawase, Venice Golden Lion winner Aleksandr Sokurov and Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer was the remarkably different approaches and philosophies they take to the craft.
After lunch delegates would split into those going to the work-in-progress screenings and the filmmakers who had meetings with industry professionals giving advice and acting as mentors on their films.
On the strength of the explosion in interest in Arab cinema at international film festivals and the recent Oscar nominations, these work-in-progress screenings are now also seen as providing a glimpse into the future of what we might see at major festivals for the rest of the year. Filmmakers would show 15-20 minutes of their films to the delegates.
Two of the four fictional works-in-progress have also received funding from Sanad. Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim by Egyptian filmmaker Sherif Elbendary is a quirky contemporary fable looking at the changing and complex situation in present day Cairo. Poisonous Roses by Egyptian director Fawzi Saleh is a tale of a sister searching for her brother, who goes missing.
Georgia has been going through something of a cinematic renaissance in recent years. Dede by Mariam Khatchvani hopes to be the latest to catch that wave, the tale is set in isolated villages in the Caucaus mountains during the fight for independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Also set on a mountain, this time in Nepal, is White Sun, the new work from Deepak Rauniyar, whose debut, Highway, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2012.
There was a huge amount of buzz around Uda Benyamina's film, about delinquent teenager girls living in Parisian suburbs. The film is already completed so we can expect to see it playing at festivals soon. The same is also true of Moroccan set drama The Mimosas by Oliver Laxe, whose debut film You are all Captains debuted at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes in 2010.
Migrants were high on the agenda in the documentary selections. Armenians in Marseilles are looked at in Tamara Stepanyan's Those from the Shore. Syrian refugees in Lebanon caught the eye of director Ziad Kalthoum in Beirut Rooster. Other topics included a personal look at one of founders of the Black September Organisation, in Elias Moubarak's My Uncle the "Terrorist"; an Israeli investigation centre used to interrogate Palestinians in Reed Andoni's Ghost Hunting; the construction of a railway bridge in Martin DiCicco's The Silk Railroad; while Jewel Maranan's Tondo looks at generational differences in a port city in the Philippines.
And if that was not enough on these deceptively jam-packed days, every evening there was a screening of a film from one of the masters.
• Qumra ran from March 4-9. Visit www.dohafilminstitute.com
artslife@thenational.ae
