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The Pleasures of Polyglossia in Emirati Cinema: Focus on ‘From a to B’ and ‘Abdullah’

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The Pleasures of Polyglossia in Emirati Cinema: Focus on ‘From a to B’ and ‘Abdullah’ The Pleasures of Polyglossia in Emirati Cinema: Focus on ‘From A to B’ and ‘Abdullah’ Doris Hambuch United Arab Emirates University [email protected] ABSTRACT: Polyglot films highlight the coexistence of multiple languages at the level of dialogue and narration. Even the notoriously monolingual Hollywood film industry has recently seen an increase in polyglot productions. Much of Europe’s polyglot cinema reflects on post-war migration. Hamid Naficy has coined the phrase “accented cinema” to define diasporic filmmaking, a closely related category. The present essay considers polyglot Emirati films as part of an in- creasingly popular global genre. It argues that the lack of a monolin- gual mandate is conducive to experiments with language choices, and that the polyglot genre serves best to emphasize efforts made to ac- commodate the diversity of cultures interacting in urban centers in the United Arab Emirates. Case studies of Ali F. Mostafa’s From A to B (2014) and Humaid Alsuwaidi’s Abdullah (2015) demonstrate the considerable contributions Emirati filmmakers have already made to a genre, which offers a powerful potential for cinema in the UAE. A comparative analysis identifies the extent to which each of the two films reveals elements inherent in three of the five sub-categories out- lined by Chris Wahl. Keywords: Ali Mostafa; Emirati cinema; film analysis; Humaid Alsu- waidi; multilingualism; polyglot cinema Introduction The United Arab Emirates is a comparatively young nation, founded in 1971 as the union of seven emirates in the north of the Arabian Peninsula. Cinemas did not become popular in the UAE until the mid-1990s (Yunis, 2014), and until very recently, they screened exclusively movies made in Hollywood, Bollywood, or Egypt. The establishment of numerous initiatives including The Creative Lab (Two- four54), the production company Image Nation, and international festivals has, however, provided substantial support and encouragement for local filmmakers, and Emirati feature films now screen in cinemas more and more frequently. The 12th edition of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), in December 2015, included an unprecedented number of locally produced feature films. One of these films, Ma- jid Al Ansari’s psycho-thriller Zinzana (2015), had already received positive recog- nition prior to the festival, after its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Texas. Saeed Salmeen Al Murry’s Going to Heaven (2015), winner in the Best Muhr Emirati Fea- ture category at DIFF, had received funding via the IWC Filmmaker Award during 49 © 2016, Horizons in Humanities and Social Sciences: An International Refereed Journal HSS-CHSS-UAEU, ISSN 2413-6301 50 Hambuch: THE PLEASURES OF POLYGLOSSIA IN EMIRATI CINEMA DIFF 2014. While dialogue and narration of both Zinzana and Going to Heaven are monolingual, the story of Humaid Alsuwaidi’s Abdullah (2015), a world premiere at DIFF15, lends itself to the polyglot genre. Ali F. Mostafa’s From A to B (2014), opening film at the last edition of the discontinued Abu Dhabi International Film Festival (ADFF), likewise gains from the parallel use of Arabic and English. With the help of a comparative analysis of the latter two movies, this essay considers polyglot Emirati films as part of an increasingly popular global genre. Given the early stages of an emerging local industry, the identification of the specific benefits provided by this genre further serves to outline the model character of respective movies. The essay argues that the polyglot genre serves best to represent the diver- sity of cultures interacting in the country’s urban centers. There have been polyglot films throughout the history of filmmaking, but the definition and exploration of the category of these films as genre originates in the past decade. Scholars from the fields of translation studies, linguistics, as well as film studies increasingly rely on Chris Wahl’s argument first made in “Discovering a Genre: The Polyglot Film” (2005) and refined in “’Du Deutscher, Toi Français, You English: Beautiful!’ – The Polyglot Film as Genre” (2008), that the analysis of polyglot films benefits from the acknowledgment of affinities between them with a specific focus on the functions of verbal language. The present essay aims to situate selected Emirati films within this genre carefully mapped by Wahl. Identifications with three of the five sub-categories developed by Wahl support the argument that an emerging industry such as the one in the United Arab Emirates is conducive to experiments with language choices, in particular for the representation of cosmo- politan urban spaces. It will become clear that both films discussed share character- istics from what Wahl defines as “colonial,” “existential,” and “globalization” sub- categories of polyglot cinema. “Polyglot films are marked by the naturalistic presence of two or more lan- guages at the level of dialogue and narrative,” Tessa Dwyer writes in “Universally Speaking: Lost in Translation and Polyglot Cinema” (Dwyer, 2005). Dwyer’s focus on Sophia Coppola’s 2004 film serves to illustrate an increasing popularity of poly- glot films even in the notoriously monolingual Hollywood industry. References to studies in world cinema, in particular examples of European films, as well as back- ground in translation studies, inform Dwyer’s conclusion that polyglot film chal- lenges the idea of film language’s universality. While this conclusion is problematic as it conflates verbal language with visual (film) language, Dwyer’s analysis is help- ful to draw attention to the status of polyglot film in Hollywood. Most of the genre’s scholarship has revolved around European films. The analyses of From A to B and Abdullah thus add to the recognition of the genre’s importance for World Cinema. They shed light on the idea of the local within the global, or the collaboration be- tween the two within a comparatively young nation. The use of multilingual dialogue in Lost in Translation arises because the story’s main characters are away from places they would call “home,” whereas the Emirati protagonist in Abdullah never leaves his home country. The three protago- nists in From A to B are bilingual expatriate residents whose complicated sense of “belonging” may function as analogy to the complexities of ongoing debates about national identity in general, and about national cinema by implication. The Emirati filmmaking movement benefits from the country’s multilingual environment. While Arabic is the official language, English is the lingua franca that facilitates communi- cations between the numerous diverse communities. In the absence of a monolingual mandate such as the one governing the Hollywood cinema, polyglot productions HORIZONS IN HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 2 (1), 49-61, 2016 51 best serve to reflect the given co-existence of many different languages, along with continuous mediation between them. Emirati Cinema and the Polyglot Genre Film history on the Arabian Peninsula is still very young, especially when measured in the context of international distribution. Even a recent study of regional cinema such as New Voices in Arab Cinema (2015) by Roy Armes devotes only the last four of more than three hundred pages to filmmakers from “The Gulf” (Armes, 2015, pp. 301-4), and the only two case studies provided are of Yemeni Bader Ben Hirsi and Saudi Haifaa Al Mansour. Although credits for the first Emirati feature film go to The Wayfarer (1989), the release date of the first more widely accessible film, Ali F. Mostafa’s City of Life, is 2010. City of Life, incidentally, is an excellent example of a polyglot film, as it uses parallel editing to tell the stories of three protagonists with different cultural back- grounds. While the young Emirati Faisal speaks the local Arabic with his friends and father, the Indian taxi driver Basu speaks Hindi with his compatriots and Eng- lish with customers. The only female main character, the Eastern European flight attendant Natalia, always speaks English, but her accent and the identification of her origin early in the movie, suggest that she grew up speaking Romanian. The movie screened in cinemas with English and Arabic subtitles. Manfred Malzahn’s geocriti- cal analysis of the film in “Mapping the United Arab Emirates” (2014) identifies the anonymous cyclist, whose appearance provides a frame for the narrative, as indica- tive of the fact that diversity in its most general sense reaches well beyond the three protagonists in Dubai’s urban setting (Malzahn, 2014, p. 261). The paths of these characters, including the cyclist, cross ever so often, though none is aware of the other’s existence until they find themselves involved in the same traffic accident. The only person killed is Faisal’s best friend. Faisal himself, Natalia, and Basu sur- vive to struggle with their new perspectives as contributions to a more or less happy end. Mostafa’s own Emirati-British identity may be the origin of his fascination with polyglot scenarios. His graduation short film “Under the Sun” (2005), also set in Dubai, already introduces this leitmotif in the main character Mohamed, who speaks English with his British mother and Arabic with his Emirati father. Mostafa’s more recent short film “Don’t Judge the Subject by Its Photograph” (2014) presents characters from different parts of the Arab world in charge of a gallery in Dubai. The curators speak English with foreign artists and visitors, but Arabic among them- selves as well as with the young Emirati photographer, whose first exhibition finally satisfies the most hostile critic of the gallery. From A to B, which I discuss in detail in the following section of this essay, is the first film by Mostafa whose setting is not Dubai. The point of departure of this road movie is Abu Dhabi, and its three pro- tagonists are all bilingual Arab expats. The current moment in global film history may be particularly opportune for the use of multiple languages on screen.
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