Conversations on storytelling, legacy, and the perspective that changes everything.

A note from Butheina Kazim, Founder of Cinema Akil

One of my favourite lines in literature is Joan Didion’s opening to The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I return to it often, not out of reverence, but because it seems to come haunting me through life’s unfolding chapters… the noisy ones, the cosy ones and the abrupt. As the founder of an arthouse cinema, I have always lived under the auspices of the female gaze, walk into our space in Alserkal and Sofiko Chiaureli’s gaze from The Color of Pomegranates meets you in the foyer in protection. This worldview is rooted in my work at Cinema Akil, where programming has always been an exercise in attention, to the crevices and to meeting points… in order to live. For this series of conversations for Emirates Woman in its keen focus on the female gaze, I was less interested in interviews than in encounters, sisterhoods in stories that ebb and flow without hierarchy or performance. Not subject and moderator, but two women meeting through their storytelling. These conversations themselves emerged in the wake of a Ramadan program I curated recently in a garden majlis at dusk, gathering four films by women.

Nujoom Al Ghanem, whose films have long formed an environmental and emotional archive of the Emirates, sat with Zain Masud, a landscape artist attuned to the quiet intelligence of indigenous plants; their exchange unfolding as a shared language of land, one through image, the other through living species. The women brought together in this series are – each in her own way – storytellers. They take different forms and might have different vocabularies, but they share a persistent instinct… to shape meaning… in order to live.

Nujoom Al Ghanem, an award-winning poet, artist, and filmmaker, has spent years documenting the lives of people across the UAE. Her work is a deep exploration of character, place, and memory. She is joined by Zain Masud, an art historian turned landscape designer whose practice is rooted in the native species and cultural stories of the Arabian Gulf. Aminath Ifasa moderates.

Nujoom Al Ghanem: When I start researching a character, and the whole world around this character, the relationship develops profoundly. That brings us together into another level, which is the production level.

Zain Masud: I spent the morning watching Nearby Sky. It was genuinely the calmest and most extracted out of the current situation that I have felt in the last two and a half weeks. A gesture of tenderness and defiance. I was so moved by the force of these characters, the very distinctive knowledge that you hone into. What did you absorb by being around them? What did it mean to you?

Al Ghanem: I start with the research. Sometimes you get to know these people through the press. A friend sent me a link to an article about Fatima Ali Alhameli [the first Emirati female camel owner to enter her camel in the country’s camel beauty pageant competition and participate in Abu Dhabi’s camel auctions], and said, “This is an interesting woman. Maybe you can make a film about her,” inspiring me to start working on the film Nearby Sky. I read the article, and she was extraordinary. It took two and a half years to finish that film. I wanted to capture her at her farm, at the camel pageants, the auctions, the races.

Masud: She’s a very powerful woman. And when you talk about how language and words are meaningful to you, you found the perfect subject. She speaks in poetry. She can’t read. She didn’t learn to think that way through reading; she’s attuned to the nature around her. She’s a free spirit.

Aminath Ifasa: I want to jump in here. We see many women-centric films acclaimed around the world, but often they are created by men. I feel it makes all the difference to see a woman look at another woman. The female gaze changes the entire narrative. What are your thoughts on that?

Masud: I was thinking about this while watching Nearby Sky. I am acutely aware of the difference in my own practice, I work in an all-female team, and what we produce as a result. But I was watching these films thinking, ‘I don’t think a man could have made them in our context.’ It requires a certain sensitivity and a trust that is more forthcoming when women come together.

Al Ghanem: The key word is trust. We are genuinely able to find the common ground where we can communicate with ease. We understand our emotions. I have a goal to make the film. Fatima has a goal to show herself, to prove her strength. There is this mutual responsibility. I might ask her, “Would you mind saying this in your own way?” Sometimes she would agree. Sometimes she would say, “I’m sorry, Nujoom, I cannot say that.” She knows what she wants and what she doesn’t. She forces you to respect that space.

Masud: And it’s interesting what you’re saying about the intelligence of these people. A sort of spiritual intelligence, a privileged form of knowledge that can only be learned over decades of life in close proximity to a place.

Al Ghanem: I was raised by four women. My grandmother and three aunts. They were very tough with me, to make me a strong woman. The fortunate thing was that their house was full of books. I learned how to paint, how to read. I had a language to express myself through.

Masud: I’m very moved by how honest you are. The journey that brought you here. That depth of experience is very apparent in the films. I was thinking of the way you use music. It’s multi-sensory.

Al Ghanem: Thanks to my education. You have to respect every element in your film. I’ve been collaborating with amazing composers in the Gulf and abroad. I gave Marwan Abado [the music of the film] the traditional songs and asked to have that melody using modern instruments. The visual and the sound are equal. The music has to be composed specifically for the film.

Masud: I want to thank you for your art. It did something healthy and important for me today. There’s so much more I could say.

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Images: Supplied