City of Life to test nascent UAE film industry

Distribution deals now close to being finalised will see the first full-length Emirati feature film hit international screens soon, according to facilitators at the Dubai Film Market (DFM).

The $5 million (Dh18.36m) City of Life, directed by Ali F Mostafa, is an insider's take on the melting pot that is Dubai, and hits cinemas across the UAE today.

A home video distribution agreement for the region is also in the works, says Ziad Yaghi, Director of the DFM. The DFM is the trading and distribution platform at Dubai International Film Festival (Diff), the sixth edition of which saw the world premiere of City of Life last December.

"All of this started at meetings organised through the Dubai Film Market," Yaghi told Emirates Business. While reluctant to say which companies are interested in distributing the film in these segments until the ink on the contracts is dry, he said: "Negotiations are at an advanced enough stage for an announcement to be made within the next few weeks."

Meanwhile, City of Life opens to 12 screens across the UAE today, Mostafa told Emirates Business. "That's half the number of screens that a major blockbuster would get," he said.

Salim Ramia, who is distributing the film in the UAE and around the Gulf through his company Gulf Film, said he was putting his money behind the movie because it is one Emirati film he felt would actually bring audiences into cinemas. "As a company based in Dubai, we naturally want to back films that are produced here, provided they are suitable for cinema viewing here.

"And I think we've found that with this film," he told Emirates Business. "The others are TV products."

He said the movie's appeal lies in the script, which he said "can attract a lot of people" because the wide variety of characters reflect the make-up of the UAE.

From a privileged young male Arab at odds with his identity and a disillusioned Indian taxi driver who looks uncannily like a top Bollywood actor, and a Romanian former ballet dancer now working as a flight attendant and searching for love and companionship, the multi-lingual film is served up as an urban drama that explores Dubai's parallel worlds and the different communities that live, work and interact in this post-globalised city. "It has a certain appeal and some ingredients that will work with locals and expats," said Ramia.

He was loath to estimate how long the film might run in the UAE and when it might move to regional screens. "Nobody can predict that," he said. "Demand depends on the success of a film when it opens in a specific market."

City of Life's success is pivotal to the development of a cinema industry in the UAE, but beyond premieres at Diff and its sister Gulf Film Festival event, it has seen little marketing in its home city so far, which makes its performance in what should be its biggest market uncertain.

Mostafa said the nature of the distribution deal requires him to do as much marketing as he can for the film. "Unfortunately, we don't have a big P&A [publicity and advertising] budget to promote the movie, so we're relying mostly on word of mouth."

He is counting on a fair bit of public relations ("We're doing as much press as we can," he said) and has roped in Dubai 92 RJs Catboy and Geordiebird to give away cinema tickets.

And the low-budget nature of social media means it has been a key plank of Mostafa's strategy. While Facebook pages on the film are fairly active, an @cityoflife Twitter feed updates its 625 followers on specific cinema screenings and location times every few hours, and the official video and trailer have both racked up in excess of 50,000 views on YouTube.

Perhaps the most visible deal will be a taxi campaign, according to Mostafa, with the RTA supporting the release of the film. "One hundred taxis are advertising City of Life," he said.

The trailer has been playing in cinemas since December, adds Ramia, who says his company is investing in marketing the film with tools including advertising standees at the multiplexes.

"You'll see more advertising over the weekend," he promised. "By the time the movie opens, you will know it is in theatres."

However, for a film by a second-time director with no track record, the industry could well say even that much is a fair risk.

Sounding quite the realist, Mostafa describes the process as an experiment to determine how well an Emirati film can sustain itself in its home market. "It's inevitable it would be distributed here," he said, adding that one reason he wanted to put the movie out there as soon as possible was the tremendous number of requests he has been getting from average punters eager to watch it.

And with apocryphal stories of DVD ladies promising to procure the film for interested parties, fears of piracy also played a role in deciding its release schedule. "We'll never be able to track that, of course, but we wanted to get the film out as quickly as possible, so we could try and head off demands for pirated DVDs," he said.

But even as he watches for the results of his "experiment", he's already looking ahead eagerly to the international release.

"As a filmmaker, my ambition is to try and get an international deal so my film can be seen in as many markets by as many people as possible," the 28-year-old sophomore director said. "I'd like to secure one major deal for all markets, rather than take a piecemeal market-by-market approach."

So how long will it be before Mostafa and his producing partners make their $5m back? "A film without a marketing budget is almost unlikely to make its money back," he said frankly. "It may not go as far as we hoped. But TV, pay-per-view and airplane deals are all still in the works and they will all happen, so it will take some time for all of that to be factored in."

Time for deals at the Dubai Film Market

The first Emirati full-length feature, City of Life, might not have made it to cinemas in the UAE without the Dubai Film Market (DFM).

It is one of moe than 100 films for which deals were arranged at the Dubai International Film Festival (Diff), under whose umbrella the DFM has been held since 2008.

Ziad Yaghi, Director of the DFM, says that between 15 and 20 deals for movies screened at Diff 2009 have been finalised in the four months since the festival ended.

Other deals being facilitated by the DFM include the following:

- Australia's SBS TV, a multi-cultural, multi-lingual broadcaster, is looking to acquire about eight films that were screened at Diff.

- United States theatrical distributors 7th Art was negotiating three Diff films for the American territory.

- Italia Films was considering acquiring up to five titles.

- Shoreline Entertainment was looking at at least six films for multiple windows.

- The Cinematheque De Tanger (Morocco) is in talks to acquire 40 films (from the Cinetech and resulting from meetings) for its Cinemateque.

Yaghi says the DFM works to enhance visibility for Arab, Asian and African cinema globally and encourages the acquisition and distribution of films shown at Diff. The initiative is led by two principal channels, Cinetech, a state-of-the-art digital video library of more than 320 films with facilities to screen them with 24 private screening booths, and the Market Lounge, a networking venue for industry professionals.

Through the touchscreen, on-demand platform that Cinetech offers, 213 delegates at Diff 2009 watched more than 3,352 screenings of the 323 films available – more than double the screenings in 2008.

At Diff 2009, City of Life was the most-watched film on Cinetech, followed by A Prophet and 12 Angry Lebanese, Diff data shows.

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