POWERFUL MESSAGE: A scene from the short film Al-Kora. Right: INSPIRED: Amal Al-Muftah
By Umer NangianaThere are few things in life you can accomplish in say, a couple of minutes. Making your point may not be one of them, especially if it’s on screen. But Amal Al-Muftah has shown it can be done. Here’s the dénouement: A little girl secretly watches from behind a wall her brother playing football in the courtyard of their house. The camera pans on her keen eyes. And, the story begins. What follows is poignant.The inspiration is personal: Amal, the 19-year-old writer, director and producer of Al-Kora, plucked a “sweet” childhood memory and projected it on the screen in the form of a two-minute film. Set in a Qatari village, Al-Kora depicts the story of a girl who is watching her brother play football alone in the courtyard of their house. She watches as the boy goes up in jubilation after kicking the ball into a vacant goal. In an attempt to score another goal, the boy kicks the ball over the wall and into the neighbour’s house. The ball cannot be retrieved as the house is locked from outside. Watching her brother sitting dejected against the wall, the girl comes forward to his help. She asks if she could bring the ball back. “How can you do that?” the brother says in disbelief. The girl starts knocking at the locked door, feigning to ask the invisible inmates to return the ball or otherwise, she would climb over the wall. “Go home you cannot do it. You are girl,” the boy tells his sister. But she refuses to give in. Returning with a ladder in the next scene, the girl scales the wall and jumps into the locked house as the boy watches in amazement. She throws the ball back to him, which he catches with joy. Here, the girl tells her brother how much she yearned to play football with him. “Khalid, I always wanted to tell you this but I was afraid you would not allow me,” she tells him from behind the wall. The boy listens to his sister, pauses for a moment before walking away with the ball while she keeps calling his name. Al-Kora conveys the message that “girls want to and they can do things that they are often perceived as incapable of doing just because they are women.”Amal left the ending of the story open to interpretation yet conveyed a powerful message. Talking to Community following the screening of her film as part of Hekayat Khaleejiya; Voices of Qatar series by Doha Film Institute (DFI) at Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) recently, Amal said the inspiration for the film came from a real life situation. “As a child, I remember I always wanted to play football with my cousins but whenever I asked them they would say, “No! You are a girl, you cannot play,”’ Amal clad in a traditional black scarf and abaya, recalled. “Or they would say, okay, you can be a goal-keeper and I would just stand there. It was really not what I wanted to do but still I enjoyed it,” she went on to add. Did you feel hurt by your cousins’ behaviour, I asked.“No, not at all. Everyone (of us) has been through this. It’s just a sweet memory that I wanted to put to reel,” she replied. But Amal has been surprised by the response to her work. “I did not have the idea it would reach where it is now.” Raised in Al-Wakrah, Amal is a senior at Qatar Academy where she is studying film. To her credit, she has already won two awards for her documentary Split Second. Made for the NU-Q THIMUN film festival, the documentary won the Best National Award and the People’s Choice Award. Al-Kora involved only two characters, played by two children. Amal admitted that making the children act proved more challenging than she expected during the making of the film. But they did exceedingly well in the end. Al-Kora proved more captivating than the other two films screened alongside it at MIA, a short film My Hero and a documentary Flight13. “Amal is a great talent. We have plenty in Qatar and DFI was doing a good job by creating opportunities to groom talents like Amal. Very well done,” said one member of the audience, commenting on Al-Kora.The film had to be shot in a single day. But Mohammed Nairooz, the director of photography, was right on the money. “I saw a couple of his works and trusted him. I knew he would come up trumps,” she said. Motivated by the awards she won earlier for her documentary and the response she elicited for Al-Kora, Amal is determined to make film-making her career. Her upcoming projects include a short-film for her school and a documentary. The idea for the documentary was a “secret” but it was about a worker from Qatar. “What does he do,” I ask her. “I can’t tell as yet,” Amal smiles, slyly. She likes watching Indian movies and some Hollywood movies but she has “no favourites”. The young student of film thanked and praised DFI which, she said, has created an environment where locally produced films and documentaries are receiving good feedback. “There are enough opportunities for whoever is interested,” she concludes.