Hollywood Hits the Desert

Courtesy of Doha Film Festival The first-annual Doha Tribeca Film Festival was an ambitious beguilement. The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana reports from the mirage.

It’s a hazy weekend afternoon in Qatar, the pint-size Islamic nation that juts out from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf. Outside, it’s boiling hot, with near-100 percent humidity. Inside, the A/C is on full-blast, pumping out frigid gusts of air.

We are here, freezing or burning, for the first-ever Doha Tribeca Film Festival, an ambitious and occasionally bewildering four-day celebration of movies and culture in the Qatari capital.

One bold “comedy night” during the festival featured jokes about Barack Obama appointing Morgan Freeman to a hypothetical all-black Cabinet and a riff on whether New York Gov. David Paterson was “seeing” women other than his wife.

The program includes 31 films, mostly Western but with 11 from Arab countries; several extravagant hotel parties; a host of community activities; and one bold “comedy night,” with jokes about Barack Obama appointing Morgan Freeman to a hypothetical all-black Cabinet and a riff on whether New York Gov. David Paterson was “seeing” women other than his wife. A smattering of big-name folks turned up, including Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro and Mira Nair. An awards ceremony for celebrity-philanthropists scheduled to coincide with the festival drew Cher, Josh Hartnett, and Sir Ben Kingsley to Doha as well.

The festival itself is the product of a partnership between two unlikely forces: DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Festival, which helped bring life back to Lower Manhattan when it launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, but is now contending with the recession; and Her Royal Highness Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, beloved daughter of the Emir of Qatar, whose small country sits atop 15 billion barrels of oil, and who has never contended with a recession.

A few years back, young Sheikha, then a student at Duke University, interned for DeNiro and his partners Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff. Upon graduation, the 27-year-old moved back home to join the family business. She runs the Qatar Museums Authority, which oversees the Museum of Islamic Art, a staggering $2 billion structure designed by architect I.M. Pei, with a peerless collection inside—and, now, the film festival.

Nair’s Amelia kicked things off Thursday evening with a free screening seen by an audience of 5,000, according to the state-run English-language newspaper Gulf Times, which is printed each day on glossy paper, immune to the economic contractions plaguing the rest of print media. It closed out Sunday night with a screening of Cairo Time, a film starring Patricia Clarkson.

Officials express high hopes that the Doha festival will be a force for cross-cultural dialogue. The preferred analogy here is of Sheikha Mayassa’s efforts to those of Amelia Earhart: making the world smaller by linking East and West. In an interview in a suite at the Four Seasons Doha, Tribeca partner Jane Rosenthal said her hope was that the festival would elicit “new voices from a region that there’s always a lot of mystery, confusion, and misperceptions about.” And indeed, before closing night, there was already a report in the Gulf Times that Sir Ben was considering projects in Qatar, another headlined “DTFF step in the right direction, says actors,” and a front page feature on Nair’s support for film ratings.