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Workshop on documentary films discusses training filmmakers

Seventeen aspiring filmmakers from Iran flew into Dubai this week for a three-day workshop in documentary filmmaking.

Seventeen aspiring filmmakers from Iran flew into Dubai this week for a three-day workshop in documentary filmmaking.

Before the workshop started they didn’t know what they were in for, nor had they anticipated the fun and how much they would learn in the three days, language barriers notwithstanding.

One of the seventeen, Laleh Ejadi, by way of conversation, said she was familiar with commercial Indian films, especially Sangam, the 60’s film starring Rajendra Kumar, Vyjanthimala and Raj Kapoor. She said her mother was a “big, big fan of the movie — she saw it much before the revolution.”

Only a handful of them spoke English, and that handful served as translators for the rest who understood Farsi.

Two key speakers — Samr Husain Al Marzooqi and Manuela Maiguashca — conducted the workshops while Mahshid Zamani, the bilingual founder and managing director of Documentary Voices, a non-profit film education initiative, and herself a film critic, helped with translations and plugged gaps in understanding.

Khaleej Times got to listen to Al Marzooqi, (Dubai Film Market Manager at the Dubai International Film Festival) and Maiguashca (British filmmaker, who is also a media activist who has travelled to Ethiopia and filmed the conditions under which women have to endure labour and childbirth.)

In his very candid talk, Al Marzooqi said: “The documentary market in this part of the world is dead.” Not that it went extinct but that in this region it was never alive, forget big. In the last ten years though, he said things have changed. Just the fact that there are now women on film sets is a step up. Once upon a time “having females working in a film industry wasn’t even possible,” he said.

A first-of-its-kind event in Dubai, the theme of the workshop was ‘How to Make Social Awareness Documentaries’. Called ‘Media in Action’, the workshop had the backing of The Gulf Film Festival, and the classes were conducted at the International Horizons College in Business Bay on very comfortable red and blue swivel chairs with attached swivel tables, classroom style.

In a discussion with Marzooqi and Maiguashca, Zamani — who was impressed that Dubai actually screened Persepolis, the 2007 French-American film about a girl in the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution based on Marjane Satrapi’s fantastic autobiographical graphic novel — said: “Documentary Voices has always emphasised on how media and documentaries can change the world’s perception.”

She stressed on how important it is to train filmmakers in this region so that they could reach out to the world by making skillful and soulful documentaries.”

Maiguashca, who now lives in the Netherlands, and has produced and directed documentary, drama and advocacy films that deal with human rights, maternal health and child welfare, turned out to a very vocal advocate of YouTube (and vimeo). “It’s solved the film distribution problem,” she said.

“It’s very viable and not a trash can where all the garbage goes.”

Unlike Al Marzooqi, who said, “don’t ever put your film on YouTube, if you put your film on YouTube, it’s dead,” Maiguashca seemed to think it depends on a lot of factors, and importantly, the filmmaker’s “strategy.”

This caused a bit of confusion — the translation naturally hampered the process of comprehension, but you could see everyone sit up and take notes, recording the abundant tips, even if some seemed contradictory.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com