Diff 2015: Ali Mustafa’s post-apocalyptic film with a heart

The latest offering from Emirati director Ali Mostafa is The Worthy, one of the first (if not the first) post-apocalyptic films to come out of the Arab world. It’s set to release in 2016, but a teaser trailer is now being shown in cinemas ahead of fellow Emirati production Zinzana.

Adapted from an American script, The Worthy draws on current affairs in the region to draw a harrowing picture of a dystopian world that might not be too far off.

“We’re living in a day in age where, the stuff we’ve been seeing around the world, the news and what’s happening in Syria, and Iraq, and the Islamic State, it’s insane. It’s like we’re going back to the dark ages. Even with what politicians are saying, we’re going back to the dark ages. Should I not quote [Donald] Trump?” said Mostafa at a press conference on Sunday afternoon, as part of the Dubai International Film Festival.

Last week, US Republican presidential hopeful Trump called on a ban on Muslims entering America.

“It’s interesting what’s happening to the world. It looked like, for a period, we were really advancing, and all of a sudden we took this huge break and now we’re starting to go backwards. So I guess it also tackles stuff like that. How would the world be if it did go wrong?”

According to the teaser, the world would be a pretty bleak place, but it would make for a visually arresting and irresistibly delicious story of “humanity versus savagery”. The characters — 12 in total from around the Middle East (including two Emiratis) — are shown wandering around the rubble and remains of a world they once knew. They’re thrown into a sudden urgency when they face a shortage of resources and have to seek refuge in the only area that still holds clean water.

Two ‘visitors’ infiltrate their compound, bringing chaos to an already collapsing reality. In the end, only one of them will be deemed worthy of living. The teaser closes with the ground swallowing one woman up, which makes it clear: it’s every person for themselves.

For the first time on a feature film project, Mostafa is strictly the director. He wrote and produced on his previous films, City of Life and From A to B. But Ben Ross, the head of narrative at Image Nation, who read the script “thre or four” years ago in the US, wanted Mostafa to focus all his energy in one place. Mostafa found the experience to be “interesting”.

“We have two producers other than Rami [Yasin] who have been at the top of their game in terms of genre films. Steven Schneider, his background is the Paranormal Activity franchise, and Peter Safran produced The Conjuring and Anabel. They have that horror background, and it really, truly helped with the creative process when it came to the film. They were attached to it before I was,” said Mostafa.

In many ways, the film is similar to Zinzana, directed by Majid Al Ansari and currently showing in theatres. Both films were Arabised from American scripts, both were helped along by Image Nation, both were produced by Yasin and both were set somewhere deliberately unspecified in the Middle East.

Yasin said that it “isn’t a Middle East-centric film. In may ways, it’s [about] purely universal stories. Anyone in the world would be able to relate to it. It’s just the setting that’s in our region.”

Mostafa theorised that borders would collapse, anyway, in a world that had gone south. “There’s a lot of these different dialects in the film, which gives it that nice authenticity,” he said.

In terms of extreme stunts and special effects, Yasin said that The Worthy is doing quadruple what Zinzana did. And while Zinzana stayed local and filmed in Jordan, The Worthy shot in Bucharest, Romania. Mostafa had prior experience in the country, as he did post-production for City of Life there.

“We wanted to shoot it as quickly as possible. In the sense that we wanted to have the film out in 2016, and in order to do that, we would have to shoot it in the summer of 2015. It’s very hard to shoot a film in the summer here, I tried it and it was not comfortable,” said Mostafa.

“But also, to me, it was very important to have the right locations. We scouted quite a few countries in order to find those dilapidated buildings — actually, the location that we shot in has already been taken down. We managed to stop the process of them actually demolishing the building.”

Of course, the film comes at a time when franchises such as The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner are raking in millions with their tales of destruction and survival. Will people be comparing The Worthy to its Hollywood counterparts?

“What we wanted to do with this is to have the same quality of production, so if they’re used to watching the Mockingjays and the Maze Runners, they’d go into this Arab film and not have to say, ‘Oh, it’s not that’,” said Mostafa.

“But the story is so unique. It’s more real. I mean, I don’t want to say that the others aren’t, but it has this authenticity that I really, really liked, especially after we worked on the characters, and the script, and the background and the stories. It’s a post-apocalyptic film with a heart.”

*The teaser for The Worthy will be released online in the next week.