These Guys Know Their Aliens

Dubai - Emirati science fiction film looks to break stereotypes

We are bid supporters of the local and regional film scene, especially if they are doing something different. So imagine, for a moment, that you're walking through the Boulevard in Downtown after having lunch with a few friends at a café. As you make your way to the Dubai Mall for some shopping, you look up, and right there hovering over the Burj Khalifa is a giant alien space ship. Seems farfetched but have you ever wondered what would happen if aliens did invade Dubai?

Well, you should watch Aerials, the Emirati science fiction film directed by Dubai-based film director S.A. Zaidi and produced by Emirati producer Ghanem Ghubash. Both have been big fans of the sci-fi genre for a long time and combine their love for it with the city they know best. Taking massive out-of-this-world themes and visuals that we all grew up with and setting them in Dubai is exciting to see on screen.

"We started with our first film five years ago, which was later released in 2013 called The Sons of Two Suns," director S.A. Zaidi told us. "It was a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that portrayed the end of the world with two suns over the skyline of Dubai burning the earth down slowly. It became widely considered as the first sci-fi film of UAE even though it was a 10-minute short film. After getting a great response from the critics we decided to make a feature length sci-fi Aerials - only this time we wanted to show alien space ships over the city of Dubai instead of two suns or the end of the world!"
We sat with the movie-making duo to discuss making films, budgets and aliens.


The Aerials Story
S.A. Zaidi: Aerials is about an intermarried couple in the city of Dubai who find themselves caught between a series of ex-traterrestrial encounters while earth is invaded by aliens from outer space. Though it's not really an invasion story, but we can best describe it as an experimental science fiction drama about aliens coming to our planet.
Sci-fi Dubai
S.A. Zaidi: Growing up in Dubai, as kids Ghanem and I watched a lot of sci-fi alien invasion films. Watching massive space ships taking over the city of New York or hovering over the city of Los Angeles, we always wondered what would happen if aliens actually visited this part of the world. Like, what would massive alien space ships look like over the city of Dubai? Eventually we stopped wondering and actually went and created it!

Ghanem Ghubash: Look at Dubai. It's a sci-fi city already. Most people believe it to be fiction until they actually visit. I mean, there must be a reason sci-fi big budgets like Star Trek and Star Wars choose to shoot in this country more than others.

Working Together
Ghanem Ghubash: Definitely, we share the same ideas, have the same influences. We grew up together reading the same books. Even shared the exact same dream, which is to develop a healthy amount of science fiction work in this part of the world. Arab science fiction is older than you think, which is why I felt a need to bring about some change in the Emirati film scene by introducing science fiction as a genre. Especially since the film scene here is mostly dominated by dramas.

S.A. Zaidi: Science fiction or not, if a group of people come from the same school of thought or for that matter share the exact same set of ideas, and come together as a think tank to the very same table, a whole world starts developing there.
Obstacles and Challenges
Ghanem Ghubash: The film took around two-and-a-half years to make. Budget was definitely a problem since Zaidi and I both independently funded the film, but when I think of the toughest challenges we faced in the film, it definitely has to be the weather. Dubai is mostly sunny or dusty, such weather favours warmer colours in a film, like yellow or brown. But to show our space ships over the city of Dubai, we needed cooler colours like blue, with a lot of clouds or preferably even a rainy day, since we needed to create shadows in the 3D designs of our spaceships. And that's not the kinda weather you get in Dubai, so we had to constantly follow up with weather reports to have a good blue sky to shoot with lots of clouds in order to achieve the desired affect.

Budget Issues
Ghanem Ghubash: Notice, that most low budget B films of the 80s and 90s were explor-ing science fiction rather than any other genre in hollywood back in the day. So science fiction can be done on a lower budget for sure. But the prob-lem with that is the danger of your film becoming a B movie. How does one skip that? Simple, don't make science fic-tion that is too contained and don't compromise on production values.

Directing Style:
S.A. Zaidi: I hardly have any regard for what an actor does consciously. My focus is on the subconscious, that's where things really matter. Just with a script, what a story is directly trying to approach in a plot has no meaning whatsoever. But the subconscious angle of it is absolutely everything!

Favorite Movies & Directors:
S.A. Zaidi: I will mention a few, 12 Monkeys.

Ghanem Ghubash: Definitely 12 Monkeys.

S.A. Zaidi: Brazil, which is also from the same director.

Ghanem Ghubash: El Topo, Dark City, and Artificial Intelligence by Kubrick and Spielberg.

S.A. Zaidi: Yea Artificial Intelligence for sure, which is also known as just AI, also a lot of animations that have been lost in time, like the Canadian animated science fiction ROCK and RULE or Japanese animated epics like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by one of my favourite directors Hayao Miyazaki. Also Terry Gilliam has been one of my biggest influences. 
Advice for young filmmakers
S.A. Zaidi: I would suggest film students to not waste time on film schools. I hardly learnt anything from my film instructor. The only way to learn making films is to go out there and shoot something with a camera or for that matter even a cell phone camera. That's where you really learn, not at some fancy film institute or prestigious art school in a university - that just doesn't work. You interact with other film students in a film school for sure, and that might help, but when it comes to learning, you will have to do that by yourself in the field.