Emirati Filmmakers on Building a Local Cinema Ecosystem

Two Emirati filmmakers are bringing distinctly local stories to the 13th edition of the Sharjah Intl. Film Festival for Children and Youth, with Khalid Al Mahmood’s musical “The Mangrove House” and Abdulrahman Al Madani’s family drama “Oug,” the only Emirati films in competition.

Both filmmakers have longstanding ties to SIFF. “The Mangrove House,” which world premiered as the festival’s opening film, was pitched at SIFF’s inaugural Film Pitching Session last year as Al Mahmood was seeking post-production support. FANN – Media Discovery Platform, SIFF’s parent organization, subsequently came aboard to back the film. For Al Madani, “Oug” marks the third film he has screened at the festival, following “Nagafa,” which played at SIFF in 2015, and “Laymoon” in 2019.

Their return comes as Emirati filmmakers see renewed momentum around a local industry that has weathered significant ups and downs over the past two decades.

Al Mahmood, who made his first film while a university student in the U.S. in 1999, recalls returning to a UAE where filmmaking was virtually nonexistent, just as an early community of filmmakers was beginning to take shape. Annual screenings of locally made films, which later took shape as the Emirates Film Competition, became “a school where we came together and critiqued our films,” he explains. “More and more festivals popped up,” including the Dubai Intl. Film Festival and Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

Al Madani entered the industry shortly before much of that festival ecosystem disappeared and remembers the “privilege” of having an abundance of platforms before “the plug was pulled, and then we didn’t know where to go next.” Abu Dhabi Film Festival remains defunct, while Dubai, which held its last edition in 2017, is set to return in December 2027.

The loss pushed Al Madani and many Emirati filmmakers of his generation beyond the UAE. In the decade that followed, he made shorts that traveled internationally, an experience he describes as a “wake-up call” that taught him not to solely rely on platforms at home.

Institutional support across the emirates is now growing. “Oug” received a grant from the UAE Ministry of Culture, a significant shift from a period Al Madani describes as having virtually “zero support.”

“We have a long way to go, but I think this is a good start,” he acknowledges. “People feel like they can go and apply somewhere [local] to get funding.”

For Al Mahmood, however, much of the UAE’s film infrastructure remains geared toward attracting international productions rather than sustaining local filmmakers. “What’s missing to me is just the infrastructure to be able to make films in the country,” he argues.

Distribution presents another challenge. This year Al Madani launched Meylas Aflam, a screening initiative aimed at giving Emirati shorts a life beyond their initial festival runs.

“We screen our film once, then what?” he asks. Meylas Aflam has held four sold-out screenings this year, with local audiences staying for discussions that have run as long as an hour.

The response challenges what Al Madani calls a “misconception that our audience is not prepared for our stories.” His films on YouTube have drawn millions of views, he adds, with viewers responding to stories from their own environment “told truthfully, and without sugarcoating.”

‘The Mangrove House’
Al Mahmood’s “The Mangrove House” is a musical about two deaf brothers and their sister trying to raise money for a competition. The project originated with Emirati writer and editor Ayesha Alameri, whose brother is deaf and whose family uses sign language at home.

Al Mahmood admits that when Alameri first brought him the screenplay, he expected the kind of story about living with a disability he had seen before. “Usually the stories are all sad, and it’s going to be a sob story,” he recalls. Instead, what appealed to him was precisely what the screenplay avoided. “There’s no pity. I didn’t feel like they were anything less than any other character.”

That approach grew out of Alameri’s own conversations with her brother. When the two watched films and videos featuring deaf characters, she remembers him asking why their stories “always have to be sad.”

Alameri’s original screenplay ran 23 pages, leaving Al Mahmood with a story he felt was too long to produce affordably as a short but not developed enough for a feature. He concentrated the film around one section of the script and then proposed another departure from its original form, asking, “Why not? Let’s do a musical.”

That decision also gave Al Mahmood an opportunity to root the film more firmly in the UAE, weaving local instruments, clothing and even songs playing with the names of different fish into the story.

“I always felt like I need to introduce something from this part of the world, something that’s rooted here,” he explains. “If it’s not the landscape, it’s the clothing, something.”

‘Oug’
Al Madani draws “Oug” from experiences around him. The title translates as “the defect,” referring to the blame directed at women whose marriages have yet to produce children. The idea grew out of conversations with married women he knew who faced intrusive questions about when they would have children, including a relative who undertook diets, exercise and other measures.

“I was telling her, what about your husband? Does he have to do anything?” Al Madani recalls. “So this question stuck.”

Set largely during a shopping trip to IKEA, the film follows a couple (Sarra’a Abdulaziz, Yaser Al Neyadi) as those pressures surface in a confrontation with the husband’s mother (Huda Al Ghanem). “I wanted it to be completely in a public setting,” Al Madani explains. “They are fighting, but they have to remain composed also. So I felt like it makes it much stronger.”

He also resisted reducing the mother-in-law to a straightforward villain, instead portraying a family in which each character is responding to different expectations. That includes the husband, whose vulnerability culminates in an emotional breakdown.

When Al Madani filmed the scene, he recalls crew members reacting to the sight of an Emirati man in kandura and ghutra, traditional clothing, crying onscreen. “I didn’t realize I was doing a thing,” he admits. “I was just staying true to the story.”

The film’s international run has produced other unexpected reactions. At Denmark’s Odense Film Festival, where “Oug” premiered last year, Al Madani remembers audience members expressing surprise that its hijab-wearing women were the dominant personalities rather than passive figures.

“I was not trying to break stereotypes,” he stresses. “I’m just portraying the truth of my environment, and somehow that broke so many stereotypes.”

For both filmmakers, the next challenge is moving beyond shorts. Al Mahmood has an early-stage feature project he describes only as “very artistic,” while Al Madani has spent the past year developing a feature screenplay and identifies funding as the principal obstacle to making that transition.

“This is my seventh short film. So I am ready,” Al Madani says. “My next project has to be a feature.”

He argues that he is hardly alone.

“There’s a community of filmmakers who have done countless short films,” he adds, “and we need to move on to the next step.”