Peaceful scenes

Ali F Mostafa's much talked about Dubai film, City of Life, is due to hit screens at the end of the year.

The director Ali F Mostafa's debut feature, City of Life, is expected to shine a spotlight on the UAE's filmmaking scene.

If you go to a cinema in the UAE this weekend, you might see some rather striking adverts. In one, the air fills with sounds of explosions and -fighter planes as pages are ripped out of a heavy-bound book. "Our history was full of war," reads the caption. "Let's make sure our future isn't." In the other two, children of many -nationalities earnestly describe their -visions of war and peace. "Peace is something people need to find in their hearts," says one. "When butterflies come out and fly," another explains. The ads may be blunt but they're effective, with all the conscience-pricking -intensity of the most memorable public service broadcasts. It happens that they're the handiwork of Ali F Mostafa, a director whose debut feature film, City of Life, is expected to launch both Dubai and the UAE's burgeoning film industry before a global audience when it emerges near the end of the year. Mostafa was editing his movie when he was approached by some people whose imaginations had been fired up by another film. That was Peace One Day, a record of the attempts by a British documentary maker named Jeremy Gilley to get a one-day international ceasefire recognised by the world's governments (he managed it, after a fashion: September 21 was ratified by the United Nations as an official day of peace, though you could be forgiven if you'd never heard of it). Chiara Maioni, an Italian expatriate living in Dubai, saw this film in May and was so moved by Gilley's efforts that she and her friends set about to involve the UAE in world Peace Day celebrations. Things moved -quickly. The -Dubai filmmaker Nayla al Khaja joined the group, bringing a lot of -energy and some useful connections. The international ambassadors of seven nations offered taped messages of -support, as did Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research. When Mostafa heard about the project, he knew he had to pitch in. "I got a call from a few friends and colleagues," he remembers. "They gave me a call and said: 'Ali, this thing has come up. We're trying to do a UAE-in-support-of-Peace-One-Day-type thing. Are you interested in directing a couple of commercials?' And immediately, I said: 'Of course.'" Children were rounded up and interviewed, their responses whittled down to the most pointed statements (though the reject pile also contained some affecting stuff: "Fighting is what my mum and dad do," one boy explained). The history-book commercial was polished off over a lunchtime. "We were waiting for the next group of kids to come in," says Mostafa. "We literally took 10 minutes. Told our DP, slapped the camera on the shoulder, let's go." And now, the UAE is preparing for its first Peace Day, to be celebrated in the Mall of the Emirates on the 21st. Mostafa is realistic about its prospects. "I think it's an attempt," he says when we meet at an editing -studio in Dubai, where he is subtitling City of Life. "Personally, I think to find world peace is one of the most difficult and, I would imagine, impossible things. There's too much behind war in terms of countries benefiting from it so no one would ever want to have peace." Mostafa is a willowy 28-year-old, the son of an Emirati father and a British mother. He grew up in -Dubai but spends a lot of time in London, not least when he did his MA at -London Film School - "the best thing I ever did", he says. It sounds like a comfortable sort of life. Still, it hasn't kept him from reflecting on the practicalities of life interrupted by war. "The things that are achieved with just one day of ceasefire," he says, "people receiving medication and treatment - it's fantastic. So one day really does help." But that is, he admits, a long-term goal. For now, Mostafa is pleased at the way that Team Peace One Day is turning into a model for international co-operation. "It's starting to become what really is the UAE," he says, "which is this very cosmopolitan group of foreigners who live within the UAE, and Emiratis. Which is exactly what the country is about." As it happens, that's also what City of Life is about. Mostafa got the idea while touring his 2005 short film Under the Sun around the festival circuit. After the first few festivals, he realised that "we didn't have any Emirati films that could represent us as any type of film industry that we were telling people we were. So my goal was to make an international-standard Emirati film". He -developed the idea of a Crash or Magnolia-style suite of interlinked stories, one that could present the contrasts of life in Dubai. Funding came from local investors and, less conventionally, sponsors. "For me to raise the money here, no one understood the idea of investing in film, but what they know very much is advertising," the director explains. "I obviously had scenes within the film at Dubai airport, or where the characters are walking through Dubai Duty Free. I'd gone to those entities and I told them this is going to be within the film. This is an opportunity for you to invest in the film and really show your brand." Between product placement and straight investment, he assembled a pot "in the mid-seven figures". "It's quite expensive to shoot here," he says. "That's why the budget was as high as it was. Had this been filmed in LA, it probably would have been at least 40 per cent cheaper." Still, he's confident that the ride will be smoother for the next filmmakers to attempt a project on this scale. "We helped people understand what it takes to make a film within the city," he says. Mostafa was eager that City of Life should reflect Dubai's linguistic diversity as well as its range of ethnicities. Thus the story of a young cab driver with the face of a Bollywood superstar plays out in Hindi. A Romanian ballet dancer-turned- flight attendant goes in search of love in the UAE's Anglosphere. An Emirati youth gets himself in and out of trouble in Gulf Arabic. "What was interesting," Mostafa says, "was when we finished the western story and started the Indian story, it was like you're shooting a completely different film. The western story had the glitz and glamour of -Dubai. It had the buildings, it had the -villas. For the Indian story, we were going more into the nitty-gritty. When we shot the local story, it had this very eastern flavour. It was literally like we were shooting three different short films." It wasn't just the -stories that clashed. Mostafa had to assemble his cast from a range of acting traditions, too. Sonu Sood, who shot to fame in India for his role in Jodhaa Akbar, plays the cab driver. "Bollywood is obviously a different style of acting," he says. "I tried to watch a lot of films to see which actor has a lot of international quality." Judging by the clip I saw, Sood turned in an understated comic performance that ought to have no trouble appealing to western audiences. The European cast includes Jason Flemyng from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Natalie Dormer, best known as Anne Boleyn in Showtime's The -Tudors. Alexandra Maria Lara, -recently seen heading up Francis Ford -Coppola's Youth Without Youth, plays the -dancer, Natalia. The Emirati characters, including the hero Faisal, were trickier to fill. A Dubai-born, Canadian-resident, Iraqi rapper named Yassin Alsalman, aka The Narcicyst, seemed a natural for one of the supporting roles. "I'd been listening to his music before I even thought of the film," says Mostafa. "I created this character, and I saw him performing onstage, and the only person I could think of was Yassin to play the role." For the other parts, more energy was required. "Ninety per cent of the cast were first-time actors," Mostafa says. "The leads in the Emirati story - one of them had acted before, and he'd worked on TV. He was Faisal's father. Faisal [or his real-life counterpart, Saoud al Kaabi] never acted. He's been presenting since he was nine years old, but never acted before." Apparently a long stint holding a microphone on Dubai TV wasn't adequate -preparation for the big screen. "When I first got there, the first day of rehearsal," Mostafa says, "I was like: imagine, you're sitting down and driving along and you just -realise something. I said: 'Action'. And he was sitting there like: 'Oh!'" Mostafa pantomimes a look of utter astonishment. "He did that! But I -understood, completely, because that's what we're used to in this part of the world, on Arabic television. The acting is very theatrical. It's not very film. He's acting in a way where he needs the guy in row six of the -theatre to see what he's doing." A week later, having explained that film acting is "in the eyes and in the mind", the change was, Mostafa says, "phenomenal. I think Saoud is going to be winning awards as the best Gulf actor from his first debut." That remains to be seen, as indeed does the film. For now, if you want to catch Mostafa's work in the -cinema, you'll have to look out for his Peace Day ads. That'll change soon enough, though - before we achieve world peace, at any rate.