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8 months ago
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Qatar’s Doha Film Institute (DFI) kicks off the 10th edition of its Qumra project and talent incubator event meeting this Friday.
Running from March 1 to 6 in downtown Doha and the lofty surroundings of the city’s I. M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, the event will welcome the filmmakers and producers of 40 projects across all formats for six days of masterclasses, workshops and one-on-one mentoring sessions.
Participants include UK director Ana Naomi de Sousa with Naseem, Fight With Grace about boxing star Naseem Hamed; Moroccan filmmaker Alaa Eddine Aljem with Eldorado, The Taste of the South, his second feature after Cannes Critics’ Week title The Unknown Saint; Tunisian director Mehdi Barsaoui with Aïcha, which follows 2019 drama A Son for which Sami Bouajila won Best Actor in the Venice’s Horizons sidebar, and Palestinian director Saleh Saadi with TV series Dyouf, about a young man who returns to his Bedouin village after a spell abroad, where he helps his mother run the family guesthouse. See the full selection here.
They will be supported by 2024 Qumra Masters Leos Carax, Toni Collette Claire Denis, Atom Egoyan, Martín Hernández and Jim Sheridan, as well as long-running Qumra Mentors Rithy Panh, Ghassan Salhab, Tala Hadid, Karim Ainouz, Talal Derki, Kamal Aljafari, Yasmine Al Massri and Annemarie Jacir.
Each Qumra Master gives a masterclass, moderated by Richard Peña, Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia University School of the Arts and former program director of film at Lincoln Center, and also mentors a handful of the attendees.
Another 200 producers, sales agents, distributors and festival programmers will also attend to both give advice and potentially get directly involved in the projects.
This year’s edition falls amid a intense period for the DFI which has just overseen the premiere of local feature documentary Ode To Our Land, about the legacy of late ruler Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani; the launch of its Made in Qatar competition as well as its annual Geekdom event and Intaj exhibition celebrating Arab cinema.
Inaugural 2015 Edition
Qumra takes its name from the Arabic word for ‘dark room’ which in turn has its roots in the camera obscura experiments of 11th Century Arab world scholar Al-Hasan Ibn Al-Haytham, which later informed the creation of the modern-day camera in the 19th century.
The event was launched in 2015 following a period of reflection by the DFI after it decided to call time on its Doha Tribeca Film Festival.
This flashy, red-carpet predecessor, running from 2009 to 2012, helped put the then fledgeling DFI on the international film biz map but did not really fulfil its remit of supporting and developing local and wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) film industry.
“We really wanted to find a way to help the filmmakers, and this was the format we came up after two years of discussions, and going back and forth on what we really want to do,” says DFI CEO Fatma Hassan Al Remaihi.
“The first year, we knew it was going to be hard for people to understand what we were trying to achieve. People were asking is it a festival, a conference? We deliberately didn’t give out too much information. It was kind of meant to be mysterious as a way of grabbing attention.”
Qumra Masters that first year include Gael Garcia Bernal, Cristian Mungiu, Abderrahmane Sissako and Danis Tanović.
The inaugural selection featured João Salaviza’s Mountain, Mahmoud Al Massad’s Blessed Benefit, Emin Alper’s Frenzy, Ehab Tarabieh’s The Taste of Apples is Red, Shahad Ameen’s Scales, Mahdi Fleifel’s Men in The Sun, João Salaviza’s Mountain, Arab and Tarzan Abu Nasser’s Dégradé.
Award-winning Palestinian director Elia Suleiman (Chronicle of a Disappearance, Divine Intervention, It Must Me Heaven) has been with the DFI since the beginning of Qumra in the role of artistic advisor.
The outwardly laidback filmmaker reveals he was a bag of nerves as the first edition kicked off in 2015.
“I was like the mother of the bride… anxious on a daily basis. I’d enter the masterclass and would immediately start checking how many people were there… and I was a pain in neck if someone dropped something or a door opened in the middle and it squeaked,” recalls the Paris-based director.
One expected challenge that first years was Iranian filmmaker Hatami dropping out at the eleventh hour, which meant Suleiman had to step in to give one of the masterclasses.
“He came into my office in the morning with his espresso in his hand and I said, ‘Elia, there’s bad news and there’s good news. The bad news is that Leila has had to cancel, the good news is that you’re replacing her,’ recounts Hanaa Issa, DFI’s Director of Funding, Programs/Strategy and Development as well as Qumra Deputy Director.
Luckily Peña teaches a module on Suleiman’s work at Columbia so the masterclass went off without a glitch and no-one at that first edition noticed the last minute program change.
Talking about his continued involvement Suleiman reveals that the support Qumra gives to emerging filmmakers is dear to his heart.
The Nazareth-born director recalls his early days in New York, where he lived from 1981 to 1993, during which time he made the short films Introduction to the End of an Argument and Homage by Assassination.
“I grew up wanting to be a filmmaker, but I had nobody around me to go to, to help me,” he recalls. “I think part of the reason why I started to be more like pushy about making things happen for younger filmmakers is because of my own personal experiences,” he continues.
“In those early days in New York, I was knocking on doors, trying to connect, there were a lot of rejections and failed attempts with scripts and projects.”
That first edition was considered a success and the DFI has kept the format intact ever since, with the small tweaks such as the addition of TV series projects.
Close to 400 projects have will have gone through the Qumra program by the end of this edition . Subsequent Qumra Masters have include Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Oscar winners Asghar Farhadi, Eugenio Caballero and Paweł Pawlikowski. Scroll down for full list.
Buzzy world cinema indie movies to have attended recent editions include Cannes 2023 Un Certain Regard selections If Only I Could Hibernate by Mongolian director Zoljargal Purevdash and Hounds by Moroccan filmmaker Kamal Lazraq, and Amanda Eu’s Tiger Stripes, which won the top prize at Cannes Critics’ Week last year and went on to be Malaysia’s Oscar entry.
Further recent attendees include Venice 2023 Giornate degli Autori selections, Lina Soualem’s documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, which world premiered in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori sidebar and was Palestine’s Oscar entry, and Backstage by Moroccan and Tunisian filmmaking duo Afef Ben Mahmoud and Khalil Benkirane.
Qumra deputy director Issa says the success of the event also rests on 360-degree attention the participating projects receive as DFI grantees.
“The original format has proved quite resilient, even if the industry keeps changing and there are a lot of questions around the role of festivals and markets,” she says.
“The special thing about Qumra is that it’s very, very curated. All these projects have not only received grants from the DFI, but at least half of them have gone through workshops at the institute too.,” she says.
“The team knows the projects very well and there are a lot of meetings and discussions even before they participate in Qumra. There’s a level of attention and investment and this is part of the secret recipe.”
Most film orgs like to reflect on how an event or initiative has grown when it hits a milestone anniversary but in the case of Qumra, the DFI prides itself on how it has remained compact, even if the body receives more and more accreditations requests.
“Bigger is not always better,” says Hassan Al Remaihi. “Qumra continues to evolve but we think this concise, small environment gives the most benefit to the filmmakers who attend.”
Qumra Masters 2015-2024
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020 (Physical edition cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic)
2021 (online)
2022 (online due to pandemic– no Masters)
2023
2024
