Interview

Amidst lavish hype and grandiose statements of intent, eastern and western movie stars, and industry bigwigs, a reputed 4000-strong audience of locals congregated waterside for the inauguration of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival last weekend.

Launched by Robert de Niro in depressed post-9/11 Lower Manhattan in 2002, Tribeca came to Doha largely thanks to the daughter of Qatar's Emir, Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, who interned for Festival director Jane Rosenthal at the Tribeca offices in New York three years ago. She put the idea of a satellite event to Rosenthal, who recognized the benefits of bringing the  Tribeca brand to the culturally-aspiring state. Dubai, the city-state on the coast, has presented an international film festival annually since 2004, and hosts galleries, theatres and two major art fairs. Neighboring Abu Dhabi, the staid elder brother to Dubai, launched its own film festival two years ago, and is debuting its own major art fair within weeks—not to mention the prospects of franchises of the Louvre and the Guggenheim. (PHOTO: MICHAEL BUCKNER; THE MUSEUM OF ISLAMIC ART)

At a luncheon Thursday afternoon saw downplay any cynical mutterings of store-bought big Western brand names. "We wanted to incorporate Qataris in the festival so nobody here would think we're simply imposing a festival," she said, going on to detail an extensive schedule of panel discussions, debates, cinema masterclasses, competitions, and 32 feature, documentary and short movies too, over four days.

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Consummating a two and half year restoration process lead by Robert Gitt and assisted by Barbara Whitehead of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes debuted, so to speak, in all its Technicolor brilliance at this year's Cannes. Presenting the revived version was Martin Scorsese, who'd seen the film as a child, and who has described the experience as being formative, recalling the prismatic whorl of colors "burning" into his mind and fostering his passion for film and for art. (PHOTO: ITV GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT)

The story is that of a promising dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), pushed to choose between her romance with a young composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and her lead part in a prominent ballet company. The film is an exploration of the artist's implicit plight: to create art is to live. When company head Lermontov asks Page "Why do you want to dance?" her response appears bold at first, but also invokes a fatal and unyielding pledge to one's passion. She replies, "Why do you want to live?"

The giddy elements of ballet–backstage camaraderie, the fellowship of a crew, the orchestra’s tweaking, tuning sounds in the pit, the comically disgruntled ballet master, the riot of students racing up the Royal Opera stairs to secure their seats before the show–are further enlivened through the framing of the film. Saturated in color, each frame of the 1948 British classic has been restored with immense care and precision, with a dreamy look that amplifies Jack Cardiff's original photography. Shearer's ashy skin, unmistakably freckled and glass-like, and her cherry-copper hair, lend surreal elements to her performance. In the film's famous seventeen minute ballet of The Red Shoes, a Hans Christian Andersen story about a woman who cannot stop dancing, Cardiff's optical tricks with light and motion transform the stage into a hallucinatory nightmare, where the darker recesses of artistic obsession and devotion lay claim. Culminating in a moment of unbridled craze–eyes gaping, brow sparkling with sweat–Shearer's charge is evident. In this newly restored print, her performance appears more possessed and tortured than ever.

The Red Shoes plays at Film Forum November 6-19. Film Forum is located at 209 W. Houston Street in New York.

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Precious, which opens at the end of this week, redefines "crowd-pleaser." The only film ever to win audience awards at both Sundance and Toronto, it's about a Harlem teenager who's so deep in the gutter–poor, illiterate, obese, sexually abused, pregnant, and then some–that it's almost impossible to imagine her crawling out. "When she's in the red carpet fantasies, that's her," director Lee Daniels said of newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the film's title character, after a screening at last month's New York Film Festival. (PHOTO: MARIAH CAREY AND GABOUREY SIDIBE IN PRECIOUS)

Though he was skeptical at first, Daniels let casting director Billy Hopkins persuade him to reach out to some big names for the supporting roles: "He said, you're doing a movie about a 300-pound black girl! Anything's game," Daniels recalled. And since Daniels "didn't even bother to start going to studios" for funding, getting Carey, Kravitz, and (in an astoundingly thankless and demanding role) Mo'Nique involved undoubtedly made it easier for him to sell the film to Lionsgate.

Daniels' past credits include Monster's Ball, which he co-produced, and, less successfully, Shadowboxer, which he co-produced and directed. His latest is a fusion of arthouse texture and mainstream uplift. "I brought that world I knew into the world of urban," he said, adding,  "I'm proud that we were able to marry those worlds, and show black art in a new way."

In the process, Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher made a few highbrow tweaks to Push, the brutal, best-selling novel on which their film was based. One horrendous domestic scene evaporates into an imaginary feast inspired by Vittorio de Sica's classic Two Women, which Precious and her mother have been watching on TV. A fanciful connection, perhaps, but Daniels defends it. "If we staged it in the reality, as the book does, it would have been X-rated. And I found that when bad things happened to me [as a child] I would pretend to be somewhere else," he said. "The argument on set was, would these women be watching Two Women? Well, I am the women, so shut up."

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The first annual Tribeca Film Festival begins today in Doha, Qatar, the tiny, oil-rich Arabian monarchy on the Persian Gulf. A swank of celebrities—Robert de Niro, Ben Kingsley, Jeff Koons, Patricia Clarkson and directors Martin Scorsese, Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and R.J. Cutler (The September Issue) are attending the festivities, which will be headquartered at I.M. Pei's new Museum of Islamic Art. The event was cooked up by the Emir's daughter, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, 27, after she worked as an intern for the Tribeca festival in the summer of 2006. (Her first job was picking up breakfast pastries.) It's the first time the Tribeca group has expanded its franchise globally, and the woman helming the four-day event is festival executive director Amanda Palmer, a veteran of CNN and Al Jazeera. We asked her what it's going to be like:

 
ALEXANDRA L. PEERS: Why a Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar? Is that still Tribeca?

AMANDA PALMER: You have a very young population. 67% of the people here are under age 30. They're multilingual and well-educated. Incredibly, cinema is the number one entertainment here. [People go to the movies] once if not two times a week

PEERS: What kind of movies do the locals like?

PALMER: The Hangover was huge here—and midnight films are popular. But not the best of Hollywood films [are exported]. There's a lot of Egyptian films.

PEERS: You are originally from Australia. What surprised you about Qatar?

PALMER: People would be very surprised by Doha. For one thing, they really know how to have a nightlife because it's the coolest part of the day. It's a community that is financially not hugely challenged–the predominate population is ex-pats.

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