Cate Blanchett
Ed Gibbs, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Cate Blanchett helps ensure a female voice in the fast-emerging
Middle Eastern film industry will be heard around the world.
While on a break from the global roll-out of The Hobbit – in which she revives her Lord of the Rings character Galadriel – Cate Blanchett has used her industry clout to help push a bright filmmaking talent into the international spotlight.
While on a break from the global roll-out of The Hobbit – in which she revives her Lord of the Rings character Galadriel – Cate Blanchett has used her industry clout to help push a bright filmmaking talent into the international spotlight.
Heading the jury of the IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker Award, at this
year's Dubai International Film Festival, Blanchett awarded the $US100,000
prize for up-and-coming directors to the Iraqi-born, British-based documentary
filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi. The award, she said, could well have a profound
effect, in an industry that remains largely influenced by men.
“There's a constant focus on how you can get the films out to an
international market [here],” the Oscar-winning actor told Fairfax Media, prior
to the announcement this week. “The wonderful thing about this initiative is
that the film festival's not just about celebrating the films that have already
been produced and showcased, but [also] about giving filmmakers, emerging
voices a kick-start and a vote of confidence, which is fantastic.”
Pachachi fought off three male contenders in the finals, and will
see her narrative feature debut,
Nothing Doing in Baghdad, go into production in 2013. The script,
consisting of overlapping stories, is set in the troubled Iraqi capital in
2006, some four years into the US-led invasion.
Dubai – the last major international film festival of the year –
finishes this weekend with the Middle Eastern premiere of Wayne Blair's The Sapphires. In a
program dominated by Arab Spring-related films, it has showcased several other
rising female voice. Among them the Saudi-born, Sydney-educated Haifaa
Al-Mansour, whose feature debut, Wajda,
is the first feature made by a woman in Saudi Arabia.
“When I started working, I felt so invisible in Saudi, especially
as a woman,” she said. “I'm small as well. Even the taxi drivers, they don't
listen to you. There is no training in Saudi. I did my masters in film in
Sydney [University], but it was mostly theory. So I learnt a lot on set.”
The German co-production, which received backing from a Saudi
prince, was fraught with difficulties, not least while shooting outdoors.
Pivotal street scenes in the conservative and rarely filmed Muslim nation had
to be directed by the filmmaker via walkie-talkie from inside a van. The tale,
of a bold young girl who challenges the status quo, is due for release in
Australia in the New Year.
Another Middle Eastern filmmaker, BAFTA winner Sally El Hosaini,
is premiering her Arab-UK cross-cultural drama, My Brother the Devil in the Middle East as
well. The acclaimed film features a pair of siblings at loggerheads, one of
whom discovers that he is gay. It is also due for release in Australia in 2013.
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