As the race for the Oscars heats up, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) screened Theeb, which is one of the five films nominated in the Best Foreign Language category, on Friday evening at the Museum of Islamic Art Auditorium, to great reception.
In a vast brown stretch of the Arabian Desert, a young Bedouin boy flounders through a punishing crash course in survival instinct. Dodging bullets, losing his brother, pulling through a fall into a well, and even befriending a bandit who attacked them, the boy, in the end, comes into his own, capping the climax with a satisfying twist.
That boy is Theeb – the eponymous hero of Jordanian director Naji Abou Nowar’s Bedouin Western film – and the boy’s coming-of-age story against all odds may be closer in spirit to Nowar’s tryst with moviemaking. “You dream of making films your whole life. I have been trying to actually make it happen for 10 years,” Nowar told Community, in a previous interview.
At the second edition of Ajyal Youth Film Festival, the film had met with a response as exhilarating as the ones its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival or later at the Toronto International Film Festival fetched, earlier in 2014.
“You never know if you will actually make it,” Nowar said, referring to his debut feature Theeb, made on a shoe-string budget with a small crew, “Theeb is the fifth film I tried to make, and the four before fell through because of insufficient funding or some guy backing out. So you begin to wonder if your dream will ever come true.”
The evenly paced 100-minute drama scores high on plot. In 1916, in the Ottoman province of Hijaz during World War I, Theeb must make sense of a hurried coming-of-age experience when he sets off on a dangerous desert trip to guide a British officer to his secret destination.
As Theeb and his elder brother Hussein live with a Bedouin tribe in an area that is now part of Northern Saudi Arabia, the two are oblivious to the historic battles being waged around their world – the First World War raging on in Europe, the Ottoman Empire falling apart, the emergence of the Great Arab Revolt, and the British officer T E Lawrence’s plan with the Arab Prince Faisal to establish an Arab kingdom.
The duo sets off with British officer Edward and his Bedouin guide Marji, but mistakenly enter the camp of a tribe that prefers talking with bullets. Little Theeb must survive all dangers, and in the process, discover himself.
Supported by the DFI Grants Programme, Theeb (Jordan/UAE/UK/Qatar 2014) brings pride to the Arab world by winning the nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Theeb has also won two British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominations. While the film got nominated for Best Film Not in the English Language, the film’s director Abu Nowar and producer Robert Lloyd won the award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, making it the first Arab film ever to win this illustrious achievement.
Since 2011, the DFI has been supporting the participation of Qatari filmmakers in the Cannes Producers Network / Producers Workshop, while a selection of Made in Qatar films are presented at leading film events including Cannes Short Film Corner, Clermont Ferrand, Giffoni, Sarajevo and Berlin amongst others. The Institute supported three Qatari filmmakers to attend the industry conference at the Toronto International Film Festival while nine local filmmakers – nine of them Qatari nationals – were provided the opportunity to work on international feature films including acclaimed director Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a co-financed project. Further, two Qatari students were hosted at the La Femis Summer University, the French national film school.