Qumra – a quietly high-profile experiment with incubating film

D OHA: Gael Garcia Bernal is among Mexico’s best known cultural exports. After working with such directors as Pablo Larraín (“No”) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores Perros” and “Babel”) the actor teamed up with U.S. political satirist Jon Stewart to play detained Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari in last year’s “Rosewater.”

“I’m playing an Iranian, of course, and at first I was like, ‘Me, an Iranian?’ But if the movie’s about a particular issue it’s the persecution of journalists. I come from a country that has a lot of that, so I feel I have something to say about that, something to put my body in it.

“I’ve always been interested…. Lebanon and Latin America have a big link. Mexico, Colombia and Brasil they’re full of people from Lebanon and Syria. Half of my family comes from Lebanon, but three generations back… the Yazbek family.”

Move over Selma Hayek.

Garcia Bernal was in Qatar to mentor four film projects at Qumra, the Doha Film Institute’s brand new film incubation platform, which wrapped Wednesday. He worked with doc projects from Lebanon (“Asphalt” and “What Comes Around”) and fictions from Thailand and Australia (“By the Time it Gets Dark” and “Salam Plenty”) and spoke enthusiastically about all.

“It’s a combination of many things,” Bernal said. “It’s a really relaxed atmosphere. It’s nice to take the time to allow things to flow. Usually we don’t have time to even say hello, even.

“The projects I saw were really incredible. Some of them were really advanced. In other cases they haven’t shot a single frame. But they all have a reason of being as well. They’ve all passed through a lot of filters. That’s why they were chosen. These films are going to exist one way or another.

“[Qumra is] small, but it needs to be small. If it gets any bigger, any more wild, shiny, it will just not have that intimate point of encounter.”

The actor-producer was one of four mentors involved in Qumra’s inaugural edition, along with award-winning writer-directors Abderrahmane Sissako, Cristian Mungiu and Danis Tanovi. Iranian actor Leila Hatami was part of Qumra’s original lineup of mentors but was forced to withdraw at the last minute, for personal reasons.

The four mentors – “Modern Masters” as Qumra phrases it – bent their collective brains to 29 DFI-funded projects, with the platform’s selection committee putting special emphasis on the directors’ first and second features.

The producers and directors representing each project were also connected with other film professionals – from script editors to funding bodies, film festival directors and commercial distributors.

Encounters began with ad hoc daily breakfast meetings among the young filmmakers various professionals, with mentoring labs carrying on throughout the day. Every day saw one of the four masters give an onstage master class, during which they took questions from hosts Richard Pena and Jean-Michel Frodon as well as the audience.

Each evening one of the masters’ films was projected, as was a critically feted film from the Middle East.

Each of Qumra’s 29 projects is at various stages of development – from script-drafting to late post-production – summarized by the categories “In Development,” “Works in Progress” and “Picture Lock,” the latter comprised of three completed films in need of sales and distribution advice.

Twenty-minute clips of works in progress were projected daily for industry delegates, while the three “picture lock” features were screened in their entirety.

Four Lebanese projects were on the roster – two feature-length fictions, two docs.

The best developed of the docs is Reem Saleh’s “What Comes Around.” The filmmaker set out to return to the destitute Cairo district of Rod El Farag, where her mother was raised, to make a sort of community profile.

Her way into the work is the social-financial practice known as Al-Gami’ya (the assembly), in which community members provide organically generated microfinance to individuals in need.

A Qatar resident, Saleh happens to be DFI’s youth programs manager and deputy director of its Ajyal Youth Film Festival. Based on the 20-minute clip projected for industry delegates (and an invited journalist or two), and the enthusiasm with which several delegates responded to it, the work itself quells any doubt that Saleh’s work belonged here.

Ali Hammoud and Abir Hashem’s “Asphalt” is in an earlier stage of development. It looks into the lives of two truckers – Lebanese Derar Nsseir moves goods from Lebanon through Syria and Jordan, to points east, as far afield as Oman; Egyptian Mohamad Ahmad delivers goods through Egypt to the Sudanese border. A documentary answer to the road movie, “Asphalt” focuses on the relationship between these men and the machines they pilot, and the landscape across which they move.

Writer-director Jihane Chouaib and her producer Nathalie Trafford came to Qumra with the final cut of “Go Home,” a coming-of-age fiction telling the story of Nada (Golshifteh Farahani). A Lebanese national who’s been living in France for years, Nada is drawn back to her long-abandoned family home in Aley, just as her brother enters into talks to sell the land for good.

At a much earlier stage of development is Susan Youssef “Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf.” This coming-of-age tale centers on Marjoun, a 17-year-old Lebanese-American living in Arkansas, whose father has been charged with connections to Hezbollah. Her life is marked by the unwanted attentions of Sami, her own interest in her classmate Chaney, and a desire to run away from her messy life.

“We’re in late development,” Youssef confided to a press roundtable. “The script is done. We have most of our funds; I have a small hole that I’m trying to close. I have to shoot this year because my film is made completely with soft money. So if I don’t shoot this year I will lose two of my grants. So this film is happening, this year.”

“Marjoun” is Youssef’s second feature – her first, 2011’s “Habibi Rasak Kharban” took the top prize at the Dubai International Film Festival that year – and she’s participated in a number of mentoring and co-productions platforms over the years.

“One of the good things about writer-directors is that we’re a bit disarming. So people tell us exactly what they think. One script adviser even apologized to me because she thought she was being too mean to me.

“Qumra gave us script consultations which is a really big gift. One was from Australia and I’d seen the script she’d edited before. The other was from Tunisia and I’d also seen what she’d edited.

“The notes they gave us were like night and day. That’s extraordinarily confusing, if you’re not as hard-headed as me. So I will leave it for a few days and take what I can. But it’s still a big gift, even to have such different professional script editors to carefully read an entire scenario for free and to give you notes. That’s amazing.”

Qumra’s first edition was marked by a high level of optimism on the part of industry delegates and young filmmakers alike.

Most of the delegates participating in the event were quartered at Doha’s St. Regis Hotel (or else next door at the Intercon), such gracious, well-appointed locations that skeptics might wonder who wouldn’t be pleased to be involved in such an event.

On the other hand, many of Qumra’s projects are intriguing.

One work in an early stage of development is “The Taste of Apples is Red.”

Set in the Israel-occupied Golan during Syria’s present civil war, the film tells the story of Mustafa, who crosses from Syria into his hometown of Majdal Shams.

“Taste” is the first feature film project of Majdal Shams-born Ehab Tarabieh. A good reason to be enthusiastic about the project is that Tarabieh was responsible for the notable 2012 short “The Forgotten.”

It tells the story of another Mustafa who, after 45 years of exile, has himself smuggled back to his ruined house on the far side of the occupation line, his progress impeded by symptoms of dementia. It was an elegantly simple work about home, memory and mortality.

Another filmmaker who has already proven himself is Dutch-Jordanian writer-director Mahmoud Massad, who produced a pair of highly successful feature-length docs – “Recycle” (2007) and “This is my Picture When I was Dead” (2010).

His fiction debut, “Blessed Benefit” is a dark comedy. It centers on Ahmad, who is convicted of fraud and finds himself in prison, where he finds life is actually better than the one he knew as a free man.

Another film that provoked enthusiasm is “Dégradé,” the first feature-length fiction of, Arab and Tarzan Abunasser, Gaza’s best known identical twin filmmakers.

This social comic drama is premised on the time-tested formula of women – in this case 12 Palestinian women – in a beauty salon.

The Abunasser brothers have tightened the noose on the concept by setting the salon in Gaza – where the women are besieged by the neighborhood mafia family (which has decided today’s a good time to liberate a lion from Gaza’s zoo) and Gaza’s police force, who’ve decided today’s the day to crack down on the mafia.

It’s challenging to structure a one-size-fits-all film incubation platform, simply because the needs of all filmmakers are not the same, especially when they’re at different stages of development.

As their projects approach completion, for instance, many filmmakers are focused less on their next film than on finishing the one they’ve been wrestling with for a couple of years.

Contacts with industry professionals can seem less important than a final infusion of capital.

Palestinian auteur Elia Suleiman, the artistic adviser of Qumra who’s responsible for luring the first edition’s masters to Doha, was sanguine.

“We are ourselves a project in development,” he remarked at a press roundtable.

“Of course there will need to be changes,” he added, “but it will take a little time to know what those changes need to be.”