Land of Sand and Cinema

Now this is a new development – for the past year it seems as though it just hasn’t been possible to turn a corner in Dubai or Abu Dhabi without running into a film crew. Celluloid addiction has been a part of life in the Gulf for a while – although it used to be Bolly-beauties cavorting on Sharjah beach in see through draperies rather than grade A big budget Hollywood movies we’re getting now.

It’s the sheer unexpectedness of how the Middle East is being normalised in the Hollywood world view. First we had Syriana, all about the oil and the corruption; so far, predictable. Then a rash of movies in which Americans befriend a single selfless noble Arab and learn some lessons about life before single selfless Arab takes a bullet to the chest and pays for the sins of the etc etc. Stand up The Kingdom and take a bow. (Still, Michael Mann filming in Abu Dhabi – imagine!)

But then a film in which the Gulf wasn’t just oil ‘n’ sand ‘n’ terrorism; a film where the first third was set in Qatar in a perfectly natural way, in which locals were neither the bad guys or some sort of cliché half-inched from a 1950s Western but just piled in with the rest of the world; a film which was funny, charming, better than it had to be, where religion was absolutely incidental to the scenes in the Middle East and which tried to show something of the beauty of the desert and some of the traditional buildings.

Transformers