Arab Film Studio top prize goes to Egyptian director Omar Adam

Omar Adam, whose short film Five won him the top Arab Film Studio award. Five also won the Best Editing gong. Ravindranath K / The National

Omar Adam from Egypt has scooped the top prize at the prestigious Arab Film Studios Awards for his harrowing short film Five, about a young man's anxious wait to find out whether he has a life threatening illness.

The winners were announced on Monday evening at a special ceremony at Vox Cinemas in Abu Dhabi’s Yas Mall.

The six finalists had spent the last six months being guided by movie industry experts to develop and produce their own ten-minute long films.

The judges panel included actor David Hasselfhoff, producers Laurie Macdonald and Ashok Amrtiraj, and Emirati filmmakers Mohammed Saeed Harib, Ali Mostafa, Majid Al Ansari and Nawaf Al Janahi.

Adam's prize is an internship to work on Image Nation's future film slate. Five also won an award for Best Editing.

Adam says: "My film is about Yunis, a man who locks himself in his apartment awaiting a phone call from the hospital for his test results. Five is about how he deals with this idea that he might be dying. The hospital could call anytime between 10am and 3pm. He hasn't told his mum, and only a few people know."

Winning the Arab Film Studio Award is something that Adam, 24, has had his heart set on for a long time. Two years before he graduated from his major in digital production and storytelling at American University of Dubai (AUD), Adam had already decided that he would apply for the Arab Film Studios competition as soon as he completed his studies.

“I actually wrote the script for this film last July, before I got into the competition. When I got accepted, they were on board with me using my script for the film. So I’ve been working on the film for about 16 months now. It’s been a crazy ride.”

After watching the film Buried (2010), starring Ryan Reynolds, Adam decided that he wanted to make a movie that was filmed in one single location. "I thought: 'How can I do that? What kind of spin can I put on it? The idea blossomed from there."

But finding the right actor to play Yunis was not easy.

“We had to find someone who had the presence to carry the film. It was a long search but ultimately we found my lead actor, Amir Bahzad, who is based in Abu Dhabi. He was Iranian and I was looking for an Arab actor, but he was so good that we ended up changing the lead role to a Farsi character. If there’s anything I’m proud of, it’s Amir’s performance.”

Most of Five is in English, but for a scene in which Yunis reluctantly answers a phone call from his mother, Adam trusted Bahzad to speak in his native Farsi tongue. "I had a kind of blind faith in my actor to pull it off," he says.

The Jury Award went to Sudanese Lubna Bagsair for Astray, a brave and dramatic film about an Arab woman who is arrested in an uncompromising position with her boyfriend in Dubai and is then pressured to marry him. Bagsair, 26, explains the reason for her controversial choice of theme: "I was a crime reporter before and those were the types of stories I always covered, so I figured I should base the film around something I already knew about."

Lebanese-Canadian Diane Farah, 29, won both Best Cinematography and Best Script for Among Others. Her film follows the life of man who travels around Dubai, photographing people and interviewing them about their lives. Farah, who works as a freelance director and editor in Dubai, says: "I was inspired by the Facebook page Humans of New York, where a guy who goes around taking pictures of people and asking them random personal questions about their lives."

Farah shot Among Others in just three days in five different locations around Dubai; one scene involved 35 people being on set. "It was good to experience something on this scale, and was great to work on my own film rather than just client projects."