Qatar is one of the smallest countries in the world. Surrounded by the waters of the Persian Gulf, which separate it from Bahrain, it only possesses a land border with Saudi Arabia. It is a desert country with a population of three million inhabitants, of which over two million are foreigners, mainly immigrants from South and Southeast Asia. Qatar is known for its large oil and natural gas reserves, and for being the birthplace of the Al Jazeera satellite television network founded in 1996.

In addition to its natural wealth, Qatar has become a leading center for international sports. Less known to Western audiences, however, is the role played by the Doha Film Institute in promoting cinema in general and Arab and Qatari cinema in particular. The Doha Film Institute was founded in 2010, and over the last decade it has supported more than six hundred audiovisual projects throughout different stages or production: development, pre-production, production and post-production, for both creations by new directors and films by acclaimed, award-winning directors on the international scene. This is the case with The Salesman (2016) by Asghar Farhadi and Capernaum (2018) by Nadine Labaki, both award winners at the Cannes Film Festival, and the latest film by Elia Suleiman, It Must Be Heaven (2019).

In this series on Qatari cinema, we decided to show several premiering films, along with four short-subject films never before seen in Spain, by young Qatari filmmakers under thirty who address issues like interracial and gender relations in The Waiting Room (Hend Fakhroo, 2016) and Amphitheatre (Al Masrah Al Makshouf, 2018); the complexity (and beauty) of the desert, highlighted in Kashta (AlJawhara Al-Thani, 2016) or life near the sea, as shown in Sh’hab (Amal Al-Muftah, 2018), because for centuries the desert and the  sea have been the backbone of the economy of this region, a place dedicated quite recently to fishing, the pearl and date trades and camel breeding.

Each of these short-subject films, most financed by the Qatari Film Fund (a fund dedicated to supporting short-subject and feature films made by Qataris) will be followed by a film that won a grant from the Doha Film Institute. This was the case with Mimosas, by Spanish director Oliver Laxe (Morocco, France, Qatar, 2016), which was awarded with the Grand Prize at the Cannes Critics’ Week that same year, by telling the story of Ahmed, Saïd and Shakib, who travel through Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to give burial to an honored Sufi master. Next, we have selected Mohanad Hayal’s first feature film, Haifa Street. (Iraq, Qatar, 2019). Hayal is a co-founder of the Baghdad Independent Film Center, and his film is about the most dangerous street in the capital during the 2006 civil war, focusing on the story of Ahmed, who returns to the city after spending twenty years living in the United States and is shot by Salma, who lives on the same street. The feature film was presented at many festivals and won the award for Best Film at the Cairo International Film Festival and Busan Film Festival. The film series ends with a comedy featuring dramatic overtones, Man Without a Cellphone (France, Palestine, Israel, Belgium and Qatar, 2010), also the first work by Israeli-Palestinian filmmaker Sameh Zoabi, who decided to tell an autobiographical tale of daily life in a Palestinian village, the desires of young Jawdat, who is mainly concerned with conquering women via mobile phone, and the fears of his father Salem, who thinks that the cell phone signal tower installed by the Israelis will contaminate the entire village.  

This film series provides those members of the public interested in the Arab world/s with a way to delve into this unknown, unrevealed region.