This summer, award-winning director Nayla Al Khaja, chief executive officer and producer of D-7 Motion Pictures, and a plethora of foreign collaborators from eight different countries will shoot the first ever Emirati Indian cross-cultural film Mallal, meaning bored in Arabic.
The film is about a young Emirati bride on her honeymoon in a beautiful Indian resort in Munaar, South India. Frustrated at the lack of chemistry between herself and her husband, she ventures out into the forest surrounding the resort only to find the joy she was looking for with the natives of Kerala.
Al Khaja submitted the screenplay of Mallal to the Emirati Short Films scriptwriting competition at the Gulf Film Festival in April and was awarded first prize. Subsequently, the film won partial funding by Abu Dhabi –based production company twofour54.
Al Khaja expressed surprise that a film about the intersection between Emirati and Indian cultures had not already been made. “Indians have been such an intrinsic part of my country’s growth. They’ve been there from the very beginning. It [the film] is an extension of reality,” she said.
Longtime collaborator and art director of Mallal, Ashraf Ghori, chief executive officer of Xpanse CGI, a Dubai-based and animation studio, added, “I can hope that more ground-breaking films such as these will help close the gap [between expatriates and Emiratis] in the years to come by creating content that appeals to both sides.”
Al Khaja and Ghori have grown accustomed to being ‘firsts’. Al Khaja is the first prominent female Emirati filmmaker and Ghori recently screened Levity – Xero Error Minus 1, the UAE’s first science fiction and trilingual (English, Arabic and Urdu) film at the Dubai International Film Festival. “Everything is so new here that anyone who does anything will be the first,” laughs Al Khaja.
Like many industries in this small country, the film industry has seen rapid growth in the past few years, oil-rich capital Abu Dhabi being a key part of this growth, according to Al Khaja. “I’m going to the Melbourne International Film Festival with the Abu Dhabi Film Commission to sell my film Once. I would have never have imagined doing that even five years ago…In the next two to three years, I see as many feature films coming out of the UAE, and I think that’s brilliant.”
Al Khaja’s main challenges were relatively typical of those of other independent filmmakers in similar conditions – controlling the budget, finding Emirati actresses as there are not that many, and dealing with the high altitude and relative isolation of the mountainous region of Munaar. She views her gender as a boon rather than a bane and advises other female filmmakers to adopt the same attitude. “We should take advantage of our gender. 90% of the professionals in this field are men, so we women really stand out.”
Mallal is due to begin production in August this year during the holy month of Ramadan. The film is slated for release in time for the UAE’s film festival season in December 2010.
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