I'm sitting here staring at the festival catalogue for the 5th Gulf Film Festival, scheduled to start on Tuesday, and I'm absolutely baffled. The catalogue, which is the size of a substantial magazine, is 143 pages long. It contains messages from the various chairmen associated with the festival, a list of the sponsors, a smattering of advertisements, profiles of jury members, and a short synopsis of every single film and short that will be shown throughout the course of the festival, which continues until Monday, April 16. It does not, however, anywhere in its pages, contain a schedule. Any festivalgoer interested in watching one of the 155 films beautifully detailed in the catalogue would be at a loss. No where is an indication of where these films would be screened, or when. No where is there a schedule to provide some sort of guide. What, then, is the purpose of this catalogue? Heading to the festival's is just as confusing; a schedule was only recently put up there and it takes some digging to find it. Once you do, you'll notice some of the pages are broken links and not all the films are listed on the hard-to-navigate schedule. How, then, will the organisers ensure enough people participate in this important cultural and artistic event, meant to promote filmmaking in the region, if there's no indication how exactly that participation is supposed to take place? The UAE has a propensity to create a lot of catalogues. I have quite a collection from years in my line of work, and it's fascinating how many pages it can take to convey just a little bit of necessary information. But, most of the time, that information is somewhere in there, if you're willing to dig a little. In this particular case, however, no amount of digging is going to get you anywhere. Good luck watching the films that will screen as part of the Gulf Film Festival. You're going to need all the luck you can get to figure out just exactly how to do that.