‘You dream of making films your whole life. I have been trying to
actually make it happen for 10 years,’ Naji Abou Nowar, Jordanian
director of Theeb, a Bedouin Western film, tells Anand Holla
In a vast brown stretch of the Arabian Desert, a young Bedouin boy flounders through a punishing crash course in survival instinct. Dodging bullets, losing his brother, pulling through a fall into a well, and even befriending a bandit who attacked them, the boy, in the end, comes into his own, capping the climax with a satisfying twist.
That boy is Theeb — the eponymous hero of Jordanian director Naji Abou Nowar’s Bedouin Western film — and the boy’s coming-of-age story against all odds may be closer in spirit to Nowar’s tryst with movie-making.
“You dream of making films your whole life. I have been trying to actually make it happen for 10 years,” Nowar says, his face now lit with the sheen of the Red Carpet glitz outside the Katara Drama Theatre.
The film was screened at Doha Film Institute’s second edition of Ajyal Youth Film Festival Tuesday night to a response as exhilarating as the ones its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival or later at the Toronto International Film Festival fetched, earlier this year.
“You never know if you will actually make it,” Nowar continues, referring to his debut feature Theeb, made on a shoe-string budget with a small crew, “Theeb is the fifth film I tried to make, and the four before fell through because of insufficient funding or some guy backing out. So you begin to wonder if your dream will ever come true.”
The evenly paced 100-minute drama scores high on plot. In 1916, in the Ottoman province of Hijaz during World War I, Theeb must make sense of a hurried coming-of-age experience when he sets off on a dangerous desert trip to guide a British officer to his secret destination.
As Theeb and his elder brother Hussein live with a Bedouin tribe in an area that is now part of Northern Saudi Arabia, the two are oblivious to the historic battles being waged around their world — the First World War raging on in Europe, the Ottoman Empire falling apart, the emergence of the Great Arab Revolt, and the British officer T E Lawrence’s plan with the Arab Prince Faisal to establish an Arab kingdom.
The duo sets off with British officer Edward and his Bedouin guide Marji, but mistakenly enter the camp of a tribe that prefers talking with bullets. Little Theeb must survive all dangers, and in the process, discover himself.
Sometime in early 2010, Nowar got the first whiff of this engaging narrative when co-writer Bassel Ghandour handed him his script for a short film. “It was about two Bedouin brothers who go on a hunting trip and things go horribly wrong,” says Nowar, “It was an intimate character drama that explored the relationship between two brothers. I was thinking of making a Western. That story gave my Western idea a heart; it inspired me.”
Next, Nowar, set off to far-flung areas of Jordan to find people through which he could harness and capture the essence of this culture. Nowar, whose mother is English and father Jordanian, says, “I love the Bedouin culture. I grew up listening to my dad telling me Bedouin stories. Also, I had been to Wadi Rum several times.” The awe-inspiring landscape of Wadi Rum and Wadi Araba in Jordan serve as the film’s locales.
After much picking and choosing, Nowar and his crew settled on some of the last Bedouins to be born as nomads — Jacir Eid as Theeb, and the other three principal cast; Hussein Salameh (Theeb’s elder brother Hussein), Marji Audeh (Bedouin guide) and Hassan Mutlag (pilgrim guide-turned-bandit). The catch: none of them had ever acted before.
With a straight face, young Eid, who plays the title role, says, “I didn’t really know how it would turn out. Acting and being part of a movie was really strange to me. I really didn’t know what to make of it.” But when he saw the complete film, he felt deeply satisfied. “My mother hasn’t seen it still, but my father loves it and is happy with me,” he says, of his father Abu Jacir, who is an actual guide in the Wadi Rum.
Wasn’t he nervous facing the camera? “Shoi-shoi (only a little),” says Eid, chuckling. “It took us eight months in the acting training workshop before we shot the film. A Palestinian gentleman taught us the basics of acting and how to stand before the camera,” Eid shares, “We have learnt and accomplished a lot.”
Salameh, who plays Theeb’s brother in the film, seconds Eid, “That workshop guided us well. Discussing scenes amongst ourselves and just sitting with each other helped us get used to each other. We were even asked to practice concentration-developing activities such as juggling three or four balls.”
Some scenes in particular took a lot out of them. “The toughest scene for me was when I get shot,” Salameh says, “That’s because I was so in touch with my character that I could sympathise with Theeb, who would not know how to cope with his brother’s death. I felt like Theeb was my real brother. I lived my role as if it was my real life.”
Eid looks around and says, “Nothing was really difficult as such.” Except for falling in the well when chased by bandits, of course. “It was winter time. It was raining and the water temperature was almost zero. It was super cold and plunging into that water was terrible,” he says.
At the core of Theeb is an ode to the Western genre of cinema. Nowar says, “Although I love all sorts of genres, Western is special to me. The way I would discover genres while growing up is; I would go like, Oh there’s something called the Western, and then I would just eat that genre. Westerns were possibly the first genre I devoured.”
Nowar further explains, “I love what Akira Kurosawa did by adapting the Western genre to the Eastern. It seemed totally organic to the samurai culture he focussed on. Likewise, for me, turning to Bedouin culture feels just right. It’s such a rich culture for drama and for great story-telling.”
In a clever move, Nowar decided to set the story in what he finds to be “the most epic time of great change.” He says, “To set it in 1916 was amazing because it was, among other things, the time of the end of a 400-year-old empire, the consequences of which everybody experienced across the entire region.”
Interestingly, Nowar has borrowed only the robust framework of a Western, but not its trappings or clichés. “As we accommodated more and more reality into the screenplay, a lot of genre tropes were thrown away,” he says, “The process of film is constantly changing, always evolving. The script changes during acting workshops or even at the shoot.”
So, unlike a typical Western, you won’t find stray moments of cool machismo and definitely not a Mexican stand-off in Theeb. “That’s why I am always careful to say that to call Theeb a Western was kind of a conceptual thing. It is not what the film has become,” Nowar reasons, “For me, the key is that I don’t want to impose a genre or a cinematic tradition on the story, which is really about the Bedouins. That’s why the film feels organic.”
That, it certainly does. Wolfgang Thaler’s stunning cinematography and Jerry Lane’s mesmerising background score celebrate the beautiful expanse of nature and the characters’ relationship with the terrain, as Nowar and his gang of non-professional actors hand down a thought-stirring winner in Theeb.
“The big practical lesson you learn after making your first film is that you don’t know anything,” Nowar says, shrugging, “When you actually get down to making your film, you realise how little you know about film-making. I am now really passionate about trying to improve myself and learn as much as I can before making my second.”
For Nowar though, the high of “validation and achievement” was in the making itself. “Once I completed it, I felt like I could die there,” he says, smiling, “I achieved what I wanted to achieve. To see that it’s been received really well is just the icing on the cake. Actually, it’s incredible.”