The Egyptian film industry is dead — it just doesn’t know enough to roll over. Lebanon is the new home of Arab film. No, the most inventive work is being done in Syria. No, you’re both wrong: As the sheer number of international productions shot there proves, Morocco and Tunisia are the new capitals of cinema in the Arab world.

The three-decade-old debate about the future of Arab film has grown so tired — the stock phrases so repetitive —that I debated long and hard whether it was even worth suggesting that the threat may lie not in the Maghreb (admittedly preferred by Hollywood directors, but with no real domestic industries of their own) or the Levant (where no star is truly a star until he or she has shot an Egyptian production), but in Dubai.

A speck of sand just 20 years ago, Dubai’s presence on today’s world stage is undeniable, and the second annual Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), which ran December 11-17, 2005, made it clear the region’s shopping capital wants to become a major film destination, too. The elaborate gathering drew filmmakers, producers and distributors from all over the world. While many of them stopped at the Cairo International Film Festival on the way to the Gulf, many gave the Mother of the World a wide berth as they headed straight to Arabia’s answer not to Los Angeles, but to Las Vegas.

Crafty Dubai officials used the event, at which comedian Albert Brooks released his acclaimed Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, to showcase the soon-to-open Dubai Studio City (DSC), which has every intention of trying to kick the Egyptian film industry’s collective rear-end before going on to lure away every last dollar Hollywood producers are now spending in the rest of North Africa.

Kuwaiti-born director Walid Al-Awadi was among the first filmmakers to set up camp at DSC. His Bawabet El-Saharaa (Desert Door Production)’s first order of business was to take out a double back cover advertisement in Variety, the US film and television industry’s leading newspaper.

On the night of the closing ceremony of DIFF, which featured a dazzling display of fireworks in the desert 100 km outside of Dubai, I had a chance to chat with the 36-year-old Al-Awadi about his cinematic dreams. Read carefully, because for all his bombast and hyperbole, his dreams are Dubai’s.

Courtesy Walid Al-Awadi Al-Awadi shooting on location

Up until I was 29, my original hobby was still photography; this helped develop an artistic sensitivity inside me. Because I was living in Kuwait, there was no professional environment for me to launch a career. Instead, I decided to study civil engineering, as I thought it was the closest thing to creating similar compositions.

My graduation project, in 1990, was a Betacam video documentary about roads and bridges in Kuwait and their correlation with car accidents. I remember the dean of the faculty of engineering admitting that it was unprecedented in the history of the school that a student submit his graduation project in the form of a film! At the time, I was convinced that there was no problem in studying one thing, then working in another field. Engineering is both an art and a science that has given me a systematic way of thinking. It’s just like a film producer managing the different aspects of his work like the project timetable, scheduling, budgeting, breakdown

As a result of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on the second of August 1990, my dream of becoming a professional still photographer suddenly changed as I found myself holding my small video camera and moving around the country to document the aftermath of the war. For several months, I filmed people in hospitals, members of the Kuwaiti resistance and, after that, the liberation of Kuwait. I think this humanistic experience was the driving force behind my birth as a filmmaker.

Another important element was my work with acclaimed German documentary director Werner Herzog (Signs of Life, Fitzcarraldo and the recently released Grizzly Man) as an assistant on Lessons of Darkness (1992), the movie he made about the burning of oil fields in Kuwait following the Gulf War.

Honestly, what I liked most about Herzog was his lunacy [laughs] because he was prepared to do anything to get the shot he wanted. After working with him as an amateur, he started to pay me as a professional. When the movie was wrapped up, he wrote me a letter of recommendation and urged me to go and study filmmaking, to create my movies in Europe and America.

So I flew to Los Angeles, where I met several filmmakers from the American industry and was introduced to African-American actor Robert Guillaume [perhaps best known for his eternally popular role as the title character in the 1979-86 TV series Benson] with whom I worked on my debut documentary, A Moment in Time (1995), about the Gulf War. The movie was screened at film festivals worldwide, and won awards from both the Houston and Ohio International Film Festivals. With this turning point, I started to take this acclaim seriously and decided to go to the New York Film Academy to study filmmaking.

I think this was the best thing I did in my life.

Gathering the courage to leave my home country for Hollywood, I told myself: “If I fail, then at least I tried.” It was risky but, as I put it, with high risk comes great success. And the proof? My documentaries that were shot under fire.

It was a small production services company based in Kuwait through which I executed my movies that recount stories of people affected by war or terrorism. Silence of the Volcanoes (1997) was a documentary on Kuwaiti prisoners of war held in Iraq, and Dreams Without Sleep (2001) described the life of people affected by the atrocities of 9/11, focusing on stories of immigration and the meaning of the American dream through the narratives of five New Yorkers.

Some of the subjects were difficult to depict on film because, as you know, an artist is more sensitive than a layman. And you can imagine the effects of the atrocities of war when you are filming in the middle of a war zone.

It was generally said that my shooting and editing styles were ‘pure Hollywood’ and I was described as being a scout of live controversial topics depicted from a humanistic angle. What I can say is that my aim is not to promote violence — as it is graphically depicted on the daily live news feeds on TV — but rather to illustrate how human beings are suffering, regardless of their nationality and religion. I don’t want viewers to cry, but to be on the verge of crying.

It started off as a dream that I had back in 1999. I was planning to establish the company in Kuwait in 2001, until the World Trade Center disaster happened on September 11. At that time, I had already chosen the name Desert Door because we, as Arabs, are people of the desert and our landscapes have always mystified filmmakers like David Lean, who directed Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

That’s the exact idea behind the ad I published in Variety. It says there is no door in the desert and that our company will be that door or doorway. I am proud because it is the first Arabic-language ad to be published in the 100-year-old newspaper. I want this company to gather all the Arab filmmakers and compensate for some of the obstacles I faced in Hollywood until I finally succeeded in breaking through.

Back to 1999: I had the strategy but lacked the necessary funding. I needed $5 million to establish it. After I finished shooting my recent film See You in Baghdad, I submitted the project documents to several investors including Dr. Fahd El-Rashed, the former manager of the Arab-African International Bank in Cairo and former president of the Investment Organization in Kuwait. He is really interested in cinema (and art in general) and he took the project to a company specialized in feasibility studies.

We succeeded in raising $15 million from 20 different investors to finance the project and establish the company in Dubai. My dream of establishing an Arab company that can interact with the Western world through a common language, whilst dealing with Middle Eastern territory and setting a new standard has finally become a reality.

For me, cinema is a triangle: art, industry and commerce. Today, I have accomplished the art factor through my films, but we don’t have a film industry and I am not a tradesman. That’s why I approached businessmen to finance the creation of this industry.

After DDP was officially established last November, the board members — including Dr. Fahd El-Rashed, Wael Al-Saqer [the Kuwaiti petroleum magnate], Dr. Saad Ben Tafla [former Kuwaiti Minister of Information], Kuwaiti businessman Ahmed El-Hamad and Emirati businessman Mohamed El-Kasemi — unanimously voted for me to be the CEO, art director and producer.

We also have American and Arab-American officials on board because the aim is to make the company internationally biased. Our object is not to produce only for the Arab world, but for the international market. Our future plans are to look for talents in filmmaking, scriptwriting, music scoring and photography in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Our first project will be a feature length comedy that I wrote in 1999 to introduce the company to the public.

Though the festival is still considered a newborn, I am happy that it has attracted international film stars like Morgan Freeman and Laurence Fishburne. The latter came to cover the rest of the financing of a new project at hand entitled The Alchemist. I think in five years, DIFF will also feature an official competition and a film market that will establish it as a festival that is just as strong as its older counterparts.

I am about to finish editing my new film See You in Baghdad in the hope of submitting it to the Cannes Film Festival next May. It is my viewpoint, as a Kuwaiti filmmaker, reflecting on the suffering of the Iraqi people during the American invasion. et