City of Life: A New Arab Cinema Highlight

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 12 August 2012 21:05

Written by Laura Blum

When someone makes a first feature film, as Ali F. Mostafa has with City of Life, it’s a personal milestone. But when this debut also marks a country’s entry into big-budget long-form filmmaking, now that’s an historic event.

The United Arab Emirates came of filmmaking age with City of Life’s arrival in 2009, roughly four decades after the UAE itself premiered in 1971. In a part of the world where oral lore traditionally prevailed over recorded culture, cinema’s dawning is all the more of a to do.

American viewers will have a chance to give kudos when the Film Society of Lincoln Center screens the film as part of its five-day series Orientation: A New Arab Cinema (August 24-29, 2012). The series celebrates another first: FSLC’s partnership with the Dubai International Film Festival to present recent works that have been supported by the Dubai Film Market.

Mostafa, who directed and jointly wrote and produced City of Life, will participate in an August 25 panel entitled Arab Filmmaking after the Arab Spring. The powow, like the series, invites film-goers to consider how current Arab cinema not only
reflects, but has anticipated, some of the challenges and gripes reverberating across the region.

The UAE has committed serious coin to shore up the public mood -- plus security measures to snuff rumbles like the 2006 riot by Burj Khalifa construction workers -- so far eluding the ferment of, say, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Free housing, health care and education help preserve stability in this stretch of the Persian Gulf, as do cheap fuel and food. Yet the perks of oil wealth can only go so far to keep social tensions from bubbling up.

And bubble they do in the federation's business and commercial hub of Dubai. The massive influx of foreigners has resulted in emiratis comprising merely 5-10 percent of the total 2 million population. Increasingly, homespun values and traditions are under assault, while barbarians inside the gate struggle to control their own kismet. Such churn permeates City of Life.

On to the story. Set in the emirate’s eponymous city, the film follows Faisal (Saoud Al Kaabi), a Dubai rich boy forging his cultural identity against his parents’ wishes; Basu (Sonu Sood), a disaffected Indian cab driver tempted by the lure of stardom; and Natalia (Alexandra Maria Lara, star of Youth Without Youth), a Romanian ballerina-turned-flight attendant seeking love.

In the groove of Crash and Babel, City of Life crosses racial, ethnic and class divides as its protagonists’ lives literally collide. The chrome-and-glass skyline of the world’s fastest growing metropolis supplies the perfect setting for this drama of ambitions and unintended consequences.

Dubai is often called the City of Gold. In Mostafa’s reimagining, its inhabitants dare to dream not just of bling, but of being.

To realize his own aspirations, Mostafa struck a handy accommodation between art and commerce. Circumventing Dubai’s non-existent experience of funding movies, and capitalizing instead on its rich trackrecord of advertising, the then 20-something filmmaker sought support from corporations to be featured on screen. The resulting access to locations and budget put City of Life in a new league of UAE productions, and closer to the Arab mainstream.

Highlights of this mainstream will be shown at Orientation: A New Arab Cinema. These include: Cherien Dabais’ Amreeka, about an Iraqi mother and son’s travails in America just as the country is invading Baghdad; Daniele Arbed’s Beirut Hotel, a romantic thriller that was originally censored in Lebanon; Susan Youssef’s Habibi, which tracks a young couple’s challenges of staying together in the West Bank: and Michel Khleifi’s Zindeeq, about the Palestinian “Nakba” of Israel’s founding in 1948. Check out the whole bazaar at www.filmlinc.com.

Orientation: A New Arab Cinema
August 24-29, 2012
Walter Reade Theater
165 W 65th Street 
New York, NY 10021

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