City of Life

It's sad to see the state of Arab film production in general; Egypt caters for a lot of it, and unfortunately almost every movie that comes out of there is a comedy that speaks absolutely no message. Gulf movies, on the other hand, if any, come out with deep dramas that are basically extended version of the TV episodes we see in the Gulf; they all seem to deal with loss of morals, divorces, rising property prices, and someone always seems to die in the end. Coupled with a ton of crying & fake make-up.

Over the past two years or so, while working on whatever projects i've been involved in, i've been working more and more on video productions. As a kid i've always been into filming stuff, I was the guy who walked around with the video camera in our family, and I even managed to film a short movie (no real script, and not exactly a high budget feature film, but it existed) when I was 10 or so. It's always been my area of interest, and slowly, i've been putting more thought into producing videos/films that take whatever local topics we have in the Middle East and pushing them out with a globalized edge. It's almost hopeless expecting anybody else to do it, until City of Life came along.

I managed to hear about this movie a little under a year ago from a friend of mine who lives in Dubai. He mentioned his friend who "produced" City of Life. Didn't really pay much attention to it since we were involved in a much more heated discussion about something else, but eventually more and more was being said about it.

Turns out City of Life is a full feature movie filmed right out of Dubai, with an Emirati director/producer. Great. Then I saw the trailer, and I must say, very few trailers I see would actually make me stare in awe. See for yourselves:



Yes, it seems we've finally managed to put out something that could easily be pushed to cinemas around the world. This is a paradigm shift right here, and it has just moved the standards of film making in this region to another level. The movie was released in UAE about 2 months ago, and is out in Bahrain, Oman & Qatar starting on the 24th of June, make sure to catch it, and support Arab talent. For more details on release in Bahrain, as well as links and more info about the the movie, click here.