UAE resident among three Arab women filmmakers to win UCLA scholarship

The Hansi Farsi Graduate Schilarship Fund for Arab women filmmakers granted graduate scholarships for the school's master of fine arts in directing course.

From left, Teri Schwartz, Hani Farsi and Annemarie Jacir announced the winners at the Cannes Film Festival last week. Courtesy MSFF

A Palestinian woman who lives in the UAE is one of three recipients of an inaugural scholarship for Arab female filmmakers.

The Hani Farsi Graduate Scholarship Fund for Arab women filmmakers, which grants graduate scholarships for UCLA’s (University of California, Los Angeles), School of Theater, Film and Television’s master of fine arts in directing, announced the successful candidates at Cannes last week.

The announcement was made at the French film festival by Hani Farsi, chairman of the Mohamed S Farsi Foundation, Teri Schwartz, dean of UCLA TFT, and Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir.

Although they declined to reveal the names of the successful candidates, they said the other two are a Syrian who lives in Qatar, and a Lebanese woman from Beirut. And that they will begin their four-year course in September.

The three recipients were chosen from 22 applicants – from UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Oman, Iraq and Palestine – by a selection committee at UCLA.

The school accepts only 18 students a year and made it clear that the Arab scholarships would be awarded only if the applicants were among the 18 best that they received.

Schwartz says she was amazed by the standard of the three Arab women. She says the school took into consideration “academic record, interviews, personal statement, and we choose those that we feel can work in a collaborative environment”.

The idea for a scholarship began two years ago when Farsi and Schwartz met at Cannes.

“We wanted to come up with something that was unique,” says Farsi. “I want to reflect the world that we live in and allow Arab women the chance to do that, and that is why I created a fund for them.”

Farsi decided that the applicants should be able to show financial need and that the three chosen candidates must come from different countries.

The initiative was welcomed by Jacir, who is credited with making the first feature film by a Palestinian woman – Salt of This Sea in 2008 – and said that she would be paying off her student loans until she was 80.

“I didn’t know where to go and there was no support,” she says. “I moved out to LA as a 20-year-old and was doing whatever I could to learn as much as I could about filmmaking.

“That was something that felt like it had a ceiling – most of the work I got was picking up dry-cleaning for a director. It’s the work that you do when you have no connections – and I have a family who were supportive, but they were terrified when I said I wanted to work in cinema.”

“I could never get my father to agree to let me go to UCLA and definitely not to do film,” says Farsi. “Twenty-two women have had conversations with their families and said: ‘Listen I’ve heard about this scholarship and I want to apply.’ And they have opened the door already, simply by asking their families – and them saying: ‘OK we are behind you.’”

Schwartz says that UCLA jumped at the chance to support the scholarship.

“Hani and I spoke about our mutual belief in the power of ­storytelling to drive social change and make a great difference to the world,” she says.

The California institution is also looking to create additional ­programmes to help regional filmmakers.

“We have a plan that is under discussion to expand,” says Schwartz about further hopes of investing in the Arab world.

“We think that it is important that we provide other degrees and programmes – it could be certificate, non-degree programmes for those that don’t want to go to university but want to have interesting training.”

Farsi, meanwhile, hopes to see the scholarship fund extended to other universities.

“We have identified three other universities, two others in the US and one in Europe.” he says. “That is my long-term plan.”

The inaugural scholarships come in a year in which three Arab women filmmakers – Nadine Labaki, Haifaa Al Mansour and Joana Hadjithomas – are on prize juries at Cannes.

“But where are the films?” asks Jacir, bemoaning the lack of films by Arab women screening at this year’s festival.

She announced that her next film will be Wajib, a dark comedy set in Nazareth, about a tense relationship between a father and son. Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri has signed up to star.

Jacir is also producing Trojan Women, an adaptation of Euripides's play about the effects of war on women. Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass and Egyptian star Amr Waked are in the cast.

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