Forgotten film shows emirates before UAE

Researchers study 1958 documentary unearthed in London to understand the story of its making, and why it was shelved.

The 1958 film ‘These Are the Trucial States’ includes this shot of Sheikh Zayed, the Founding Father, in Al Ain. Courtesy Imperial War Museum

ABU DHABI // Stashed deep in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London lies a reel of a black-and-white film considered to be among the UAE’s earliest documentaries.

Now the 15-minute production from 1958, which features each of the seven emirates as they were before unification, is the focus of new research to understand the story behind it.

These are the Trucial States provides a fascinating insight into that era. In the film, women labour, children learn in classrooms and goods are sold in the bustling alleyways of old Dubai.

In 2013, American architect and writer Todd Reisz pieced together the film’s origins by sifting through hundreds of British government records, including correspondence from the diplomat who wrote the film’s script.

Reisz publicly screened the film at the 2013 Gulf Studies Symposium in Kuwait.

“I haven’t seen anything else like it,” said film scholar and curator Dr Omar Kholeif. “I have watched everything that comes out of the UAE in terms of cultural production in the last 10 to 15 years and none of it has referenced or invoked anything as early, to date, as this. I do think it is probably one of the earliest visual representations on film of the UAE.”

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• Buy a DVD copy of the film

A DVD copy of These Are the Trucial States can be purchased for private use from the Imperial War Museum in London.

The film’s catalogue number is COI 764. For inquiries, email [e-mail].

A digital version of the film was uploaded to YouTube in 2014, but that version may be in breach of licensing agreements.

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Reisz came across hints of the film’s existence while researching for a book he is writing about urban development in Dubai from 1950 through 1970.

That led him to the cables of J Peter Tripp, the highest-ranking British official in Dubai from 1955 to 1958, who "unwittingly became the project's original pitchman and scriptwriter", Reisz wrote in Landscapes of Production: Filming Dubai and the Trucial States, recently published in the Journal of Urban History.

In 1957, the British foreign office learnt that BP had hired a film crew to document the company’s oil operations in Abu Dhabi. To save money on production, the foreign office teamed up with BP to share the crew.

The government film was meant to be a “public relations campaign” to counter pan-Arab media, which “were successfully depicting Britain’s continuing presence in the Trucial States as a menacing and tainted vestige of colonialism,” said Reisz.

In a letter to his superiors, Mr Tripp wrote: “This film would attempt to illustrate the ways in which the Rulers of the Trucial States spend the money so generously provided by their old friend and benefactor – HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] – in order to promote the well-being of their peoples,” according to Reisz.

At a time when colonial propaganda films were commonly produced in colour, the government chose to use black and white film.

"These are the Trucial States was to portray a naive, premodern society in black and white, slowly testing the potentials of modern advancements," Reisz said.

“Colour was where the British government was helping the Trucial States’ inhabitants get to, by means of BP’s colour-saturated boring machines.”

Tripp chose scenes of everyday life in each of the seven emirates that depicted traditional ways and signs of technological advancement, he said.

“There are no scenes of domesticity or of recreation. Every scene is one of people at work. Even children are at work learning.

“Women are also labouring – selling goods in Dubai’s narrow alleyways, fetching water at a well and negotiating through the market.”

In the film Sheikh Zayed, the Founding Father, appears at a falaj (an ancient underground water channel) in Al Ain, where they were developing the “aflaj (the plural of falaj) system to provide water for agriculture”, Reisz said.

But These are the Trucial States was never distributed. It was screened once in London for "visiting Bahraini personalities" who found it "highly interesting and offered no criticism", he said.

“I suggest that one of the reasons that it was shelved and never seen, and this is something that happens very frequently with these propaganda films, is because they are often portraying situations that quickly change.

“Political situations change, global relationships can change, and I think that is what happens in this film.”