In his career as copywriter, ad filmmaker and now owner of his own production house in Dubai, Neel Kumar has written, and read, quite a few screenplays. But none, he says, have ever been strong enough to help him fulfil his long-held dream of making a narrative film.
That’s until he finished writing the screenplay for Security, about a Pakistani man and his Indian colleague who guard an empty desert site in Dubai, in November last year.
“It was the first screenplay that I really liked since I started writing six years ago,” recalls Kumar. “I showed it to my business partner Umran Shaikh and he felt the same way and we decided to go ahead with it.”
Self-funded and produced under their company Akela Films, along with the Dubai-based Alkatraz Production, the trailer for the short film, which premiered last month, is already creating quite a buzz online. The pair are now putting finishing touches to enter it into the US independent film festival Sundance.
For Kumar, a Canadian citizen with Indian roots who grew up in the UAE, the story was personal.
“One of the things I love about Dubai is you get people from so many different parts of the world here. And I have never seen Indians and Pakistanis work so closely with each other anywhere else as here. I find that very interesting,” he says.
“In the film, the Indian security guard has just moved from India, he’s never been out of the country before, and he’s got all these pre-conceived notions about people from Pakistan. And he’s all alone with him in a desert.”
We all have our own perceptions about the other, says Shaikh, who is from Mumbai.
“A lot of people when they first come here, from India or Pakistan, they are very wary of each other. All they know is what they’ve been told or heard. But we all eventually realise we are all the same,” he says.
The 25-minute film took five days to shoot in the Dubai desert, with a few additional days for rehearsals.
“We shot in August and it was not easy because of the heat. We’d start at 5am, shoot until 11am and then head back to cut... then start shooting again from 4pm to 11pm,” says Kumar. “We got maybe about 90 minutes’ sleep a day during the shoot.”
But the harsh conditions worked well for the kind of story they wanted to tell, says Shaikh. “No one wants to shoot in that setting. There’s haze, it’s not clear, it’s muddy and murky. But this is how security guys work in the heat, and we wanted that rough environment to come through.”
While the film opens with an India-Pakistan theme, it evolves into something else entirely, says Kumar.
“We move on very quickly to another theme, which is why we do what we do. What’s our purpose? Is there or should there be really one? Why do we do what we do? Just like these two men guarding an empty site, what are they really guarding? Would anything happen if they were not there?”
Kumar came up with the idea for the story after a conversation he was having with the security guards in his neighbourhood.
The film has cost them Dh41,000 so far, despite them using their own equipment and other production companies loaning to them for free, and no additional cost on post-production work.
“The guy who plays the Pakistani actually works in our company, so we had to give him ‘leave’ for the shoot. And the Indian is played by Umar’s cousin, who flew from Mumbai for a few days,” explains Kumar, who set up Akela Films in 2011. Shaikh, an ex-colleague, joined him in 2014.
They are now working on a full-length feature, they say.
“Narrative features have always been our end goal. We’ve locked down this idea about a guy who have come here from the Sub Continent and it’s about his perspective of life here. We’re pitching this to some serious actors from India and the west and hopefully we will shoot the film next year,” says Kumar.
“Dubai is a very interesting place with an unique set of circumstances. And when you throw people into that melting pot, interesting things happen.”
For more on Security, go to akelafilms.com.
