The making of a director

One day he took his seven-year-old son, Nawaf, to the film set and asked him to play. In the beginning, Nawaf wasn’t doing much—small roles, silent roles—and kept laughing a lot. Gradually, though, the young boy got the bug. Now, three decades down the line, Nawaf Al Janahi’s movie, Sea Shadow, premiered at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival a couple of weeks ago and it is going to be in cinemas across the UAE on November 17.

“I was 14 years old when I made my decision that this is the field I want to pursue,” remembers Nawaf. He asked to act in more roles and did so in TV, on theatre stage and in school. At the same time, he would watch movies on TV and on any VHS tape he could find. Of course, the appeal of the story itself was there, but from an early age Nawaf was watching movies with the eye of the filmmaker.

“It was more about the curiosity of how you can make things look so real with a camera. I knew it was acting, but that trick of making it real was what I was after. This is, perhaps, why I wanted to study film.”

When he broke the news to his father about going to a film academy, it wasn’t received well, even though Mohammed Al Janahi was an actor himself.

“Nobody believed in me; it was zero per cent! My friends would either support me just from a friendship point of view or say ‘Who do you think you are? Be realistic’.”

“As for my family, my father didn’t even agree, saying that this is a field that doesn’t pay much, which was true back then.”

Eventually, Nawaf went to Egypt and enrolled in the cinema institute there, but when he called home and asked for tuition money, his father got him a scholarship instead, which was for a film academy, but not in Egypt, in California.

When he returned to Abu Dhabi, the young filmmaker helped establish the Emirates Film Competition and began working on his first film, which was an 18-minute short in early 2002.

“It was called Obsession and it is, perhaps, the only film I don’t want anybody to watch because I forced it to be born,” explained Nawaf.

Despite the “forced” filming and editing issues, Obsession did screen and was much talked about in the Emirates Film Competition and the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. What followed was Nawaf’s first film that he is actually proud of: the silent, black and white short On a Road, which won the Special Jury Prize in the Emirates Film competition and was screened at several European and Arab film festivals.

“The idea was related to the concept of a person who does all he can to achieve what he needs.”

After a couple more shorts, came Nawaf’s first full length film, The Circle, in 2009, very well received by critics worldwide.

“I wrote it in 2001, so it was an old script that I had, but back then the whole environment and situation weren’t helping to make this movie,” points out Nawaf.

The story is about Ibrahim, a poet and a journalist, who discovers that he is dying soon from a fatal disease. He confronts his crook partner, Bader, and demands his share to make sure that his wife has a better life after he’s gone.

Shihab, a professional thief, forced by his boss to do jobs for him in order to pay off a huge debt, plans to quit the crime world to take care of his younger sister. They both meet accidentally just as they begin seeing the world from different perspectives. “When it came out, critics said good things about it, which was nice, especially since I didn’t expect it at all.”

Despite the success The Circle had in festivals, the film was never shown anywhere else. Nawaf sold the rights for his film to MBC, but to this day the corporation failed both to find a distributor for the big screens and to show it on its TV channels.

Not the same fate had his second and latest movie, Sea Shadow. A beautiful story of young love, friendship and family turbulence, Sea Shadow went right to the heart of the audience here in Abu Dhabi.

In the shadow of the sea lies the fareej, an old, traditional neighbourhood in Ras Al Khaimah. Here we meet Kaltham, a beautiful Emirati girl, returning home from the grocery shop. She drops a bag and Mansour, the soft, shy and very likeable boy, rushes to help. They are both teenagers, 16 years of age, and without a doubt, they like each other.

“How do you know if you are in love?” asks Mansour.

“Everything in you freezes, except your heart”, replies his best friend Sultan.

This is a coming of age story, told—or rather beautifully written by Mohammed Hassan Ahmed—from beyond cultural and geographical boundaries, but from an Emirati perspective. In fact, everything in this movie, from the music to the dialogues and from the body language to decor—reflects nostalgia for the days gone by in the old fareej, when life was simple, but meaningful.

“Mohammed is a type of writer feeding from his life,” says Nawaf. “I loved the idea immediately, and I loved the characters; they are deep and beautiful.”

Initially, Nawaf began working with Mohammed on Sea Shadow in 2009, planning to produce it independently. After The Circle premiered in the Gulf Film Festival in Dubai, though, the one-year-old Image Nation film production company, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media, approached Nawaf and offered to produce his next movie. Everybody was happy and Sea Shadow became the first Emirati movie to be produced by Image Nation, and soon to be released in cinemas across the Gulf.

Where to go from here? Well, in the words of Citizen Kane one of Nawaf’s many movies that are stuck with him, “There’s only one person in the world who’s going to decide what I’m going to do and that’s me...”

Indeed, the filmmaker is rather mysterious about his future projects, but he does mention his website that he is involved in, and working on Bardo, a supernatural drama script by Russian writer Amir Olin.

And, when not busy making a movie, you will often find him watching one. “Ha, ha! This is a very personal question!” “But yeah, sometimes my tears would go down at some films,” he admits.

• UAE
• Abu Dhabi
• Dubai