Dubai's silent movie star

The scene in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol where Tom Cruise dangles from the Burj Khalifa leaves nobody in any doubt of who the real star of the scene is. It's the Burj, all gleaming glass and steel, towering over the lesser minions on the now-famous Dubai skyscape.

But, while the Burj Khalifa is dazzling audiences across the world as the shimmering backdrop to Cruise's latest action-packed blockbuster, there's another star in town, quietly winning awards and similarly reinforcing Dubai's place on the global stage. It may not be as fancy as the Burj Al Arab or as glitzy as The Dubai Mall, but it's stealing the show in every scene of an award-winning film.

Enter stage-left: the Dubai Creek, that majestic, moody river that thousands cross every day, the lifeline of old Dubai, which keeps changing with every light, and yet remains the same.

The supporting cast? The exotic dhows that throng its banks, the weather-beaten sailors who man them, the shops and businesses lining the Creek and the countless people who run them.

Uniquely Middle Eastern

Interestingly, the man showcasing this unsung hero of Dubai is an American - 62-year-old New Yorker, Tim Kennedy, assistant professor of landscaping architecture and film studies at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). His 22-minute documentary, The Floating Life of Dubai Creek, won the Best Film award at the third Ares Film and Media Festival held in Siracusa, Italy, in November. It was earlier shown to great acclaim at the New York City International Film Festival in July.

Tim spotted the Creek's star potential when he first saw it more than seven years ago. He was a tourist then and felt as if he'd been transported to a different world.

"I was very excited because it was very unique to the Middle East," he says. "I saw a side of Dubai that I never knew existed. The projects that get the most press are the large buildings that are more of a western narrative. The Creek has a definite character, a sensual identity about what this place is."

Since then Tim's wanted to include the Dubai Creek as a character in one of his film projects. "There's a concept in design called ‘sense of place' - each place has a unique character," he says. "This is important for designers to understand so that they can create something appropriate for the location.

"I first visited the Creek after I'd been to see the Burj al Arab and Madinat Jumeirah. For me, the Creek takes precedence over these landmarks in giving Dubai that unique character."

Tim believes that Dubai wouldn't be what it is today without the Creek.

"It's where it all started. If you look at the pictures from the 1950s it was just a small settlement. So, within one lifetime it's become a huge, expensive development."

The hidden side of Dubai

The Floating Life of Dubai Creek opens with a panoramic shot of the Creek and then zooms into the dhows, while a Hollywood-style background score rises in crescendo. But if you expect a grandiose Arabian Nights kind of treatment of the subject, be warned. Tim is no fan of Hollywood. For him, the Creek is the hero, and the people who float on it or live off it on the sidelines are the supporting cast members.One such character is a 73-year-old ship captain from Abadan in Iran, whose experiences make an interesting comment on the passage of time: "It used to take them weeks to reach Dubai from Iran," says Tim.

"The Creek hadn't been dredged then, and they had to anchor the dhow near the mouth of the creek and enter in smaller boats. They could walk across the Creek during low tide."

The lines on the old captain's humorous face and his wise eyes speak volumes as he looks into the camera while going about his job on the boat.

"You know the way Dubai's usually portrayed in films," Tim says. "Whether it's the thriller Syriana or Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, those films take the tourist path. My film is about trying to portray a part of the city that is lesser-known."

The tourist path Tim alludes to is the gold souq and the shopping areas around the Creek. "If you get off the path it's a diverse community out there," he explains.

"The more I went there the more it interested me in how I could portray this sort of mosaic through a montage kind of edit, and show a side of Dubai that not many people have experienced.

"There's this global projection of what Dubai is, a branding campaign that's succeeded; wherever you go, people seem to know about Dubai. But I've shown this film to people who've lived in Dubai and they said they've never seen this side of it."

Mosaics of life

The film slices together images that are seemingly random, but on reflection make a pattern that gradually shapes the character of the city. Tim says his experiences while shooting on the Creek influenced the structure his film took on the editing table:

"The sense of Gulf hospitality that pervades the area amazed me. To step off the regular path of tourists, who hang back and take pictures, and actually approach the sailors in the boats was very hard for me. I didn't see any other tourist do it and I was afraid that if I got on their boat they'd tell me to get lost. I am from New York, you see! But to my surprise, when I asked if I may go on board to film them, they welcomed me. They were happy to have me, they engaged me in conversation. It surprised me. I'd not been introduced to such hospitality until I came here."

Tim depicts this world in his film through telling images of the sailors' camaraderie at work. They make tea, they work, they tell jokes and back-slap each other. "As a visual artist I am trying to create a portrait, a kind of mosaic of the different elements," he explains. "It's a personal vision too, a lot of things are there because of my sensibility. I don't have any commentary, but I am making a comment by the selection of shots I've chosen to show in the film. I am asking the viewers to make the connection themselves. A lot of documentaries put the images together and the voice-over tells you how to understand it. Here, I am asking the viewer to create their own understanding." There are snatches of dialogue in multiple languages - Arabic, Farsi, Hindi and broken English - that don't have to be subtitled to be understood; it is clear from the images and the editing what the characters mean. Tim lets the local culture and history of the Creek shine through and speak for itself through the images..

"For me, the dhows and the sailors and the traders who live around them are real-life enactments of what has always been," he says. "This is no play-acting. Life is still very much the same for them."

Capturing a moment in time

In such a rapidly evolving city as Dubai, Tim was keenly aware of the mutability of the present and the Creek's current appearance. Part of his motivation in making the film was to preserve the Creek and the lives of its inhabitants for future generations.

"I was interested in capturing this moment in time. Things are developing so quickly in Dubai that even within the process of shooting this film, we saw huge projects being proposed. I was concerned that this environment could be erased. The film was an attempt to capture a time in place for posterity."

The importance of this was evident in the reaction he received when he showed it at a conference in Singapore last May.

"The residents there were quick to find a strong connection between the two cities, apart from commerce," he relates.

"Looking at the Dubai Creek, they said ‘it looks like ours'. Apparently, they had a river that came down into the land from the sea, but it is now lost in all the development. There was a sadness about losing that identity. I think the Dubai Creek too faces such challenges that aim at modernising the land around it. But equally, I know there are forces that don't want to lose this identity, so I have hopes for it."