A high-profile panel of guests aired and shared their opinions on how to bridge the cultural divide during DIFF at the weekend.
So, just how do you build a cultural bridge? That was the question on everyone's lips as we took our seats at the Madinat Theatre on Friday. There to give us the answers was Dubai International Film Festival's second Cultural Bridge Panel made up of acclaimed actor and activist Danny Glover, renowned author Paolo Coelho, writer, actor and debut director Rayda Jacobs, and Al Arabiya journalist Gisele Khoury.
in the desert
Wearing black jeans and a black shirt, Coelho began proceedings with a story of how he had gone dune bashing in the desert the day before and, after a short spell at the wheel, he had become stuck.
"I know how to drive a car, I know what is sand, I know what is desert -but this is not enough," said the Brazilian. "At this moment [when I got stuck, I thought] what is this bridge about? How can I use all my cultural background to fulfil this gap?"
Initially, he tried to use his hands to dig but it was useless. Then, he gave up and put himself in the "hands of God and the people who knew about the desert".
"From the moment I started to surrender myself, this thing became a magical experience. When you meet people, you don't try to elaborate, you try merely to participate, to share, to give a little bit of yourself, to learn from this person. We still need bridges but let's really reflect on the meaning of bridges. It's not something you need to cross. Our culture, our values, they belong to the same idea that is translated through symbols. A bridge is a symbol."
Two pillars
The author also revealed he had been sent to a mental institution three times in his teens because he wanted to be an artist.
He then got arrested three times during the hippy era and said nothing good came out of it.
"Sometimes you say, ‘OK, they won', when in fact they did not because I am here talking to you today," he said. "Not only did I stick to my values but I decided to do it all my life.
"You have two pillars in this bridge. The first one is called discipline - you really need to focus. And the second pillar is called compassion. You know that you have to get here but you don't know how to get here. From the moment that you surrender yourself and you accept that you are not independent, that you are dependent, you can cross this bridge and you can attain this goal."
Glover said extraordinary changes had happened around the world since he was born in 1946. "I have watched people try to stand up courageously to change the existing injustice they lived in and all the liberation movements over the world," he said. "They, in some sense, gave me a perspective of my relationship to the world. The idea that I am a citizen of the world was something I have been able to cultivate as a result of the work that I've done through film."
The American actor has just finished a film called Blindness, based on a novel by a Portuguese writer, which has been made by a Brazilian director and a Canadian producer, and features Japanese, Brazilian and Canadian actors.
"Here we have this incredible idea of what kind of language and what kind of relationship do people create when they lose sight," he said. "They have to find another way to come together and create a new world. That's almost a metaphor for what we have today in the 21st century."
Perceptions
A lively member of the panel was Rayda, 60, whose film Confessions of a Gambler is being screened at DIFF. The South African Muslim experienced first hand what it was like to be different, growing up with fair skin in a Muslim family with darker skin.
Forced out of South Africa at 21, she returned to rediscover her home country following 27 years in Canada.
"I am dedicated to changing perceptions about women in Islam," she said. "I made a documentary called Portrait of Muslim Women of six very ordinary women with extraordinary lives. And when I sent it to the network they accepted it immediately because they said I was changing perceptions."
In Confessions of a Gambler, which Rayda wrote, directed and starred in, she explores the experience of a good Muslim woman who becomes addicted to gambling after visiting a casino with a friend.
"I made this film to show we are all the same," she said. "We can be good, we can do all the right things but we slip sometimes and we struggle to be good. Women all over the world, whether they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, they all have the same issues and film certainly helps you to bridge that gap."
While not everyone was captivated (I had snoring in stereo either side of me at one point), this year's Cultural Bridge Panel left the majority of us with a feeling of optimism that bridges could be built through the medium of film.
