Sophia Al-Maria’s failed film project has morphed into an art exhibition

The last time The National spoke to the author, filmmaker and artist Sophia Al-Maria, who describes herself as ”Qatarican” – her father has a Bedouin background and her mother is American – the world was at her feet.

Her memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012) had just been published to spectacular reviews praising her elegiac descriptions of a changing Gulf environment.

Her essays and artworks looking at “Gulf Futurism” – a phrase she coined to express the importance of technology and consumerism to the area – had grabbed the attention of taste-making magazines around the world.

And most intriguingly of all, the Girl with a Pearl Earring director Peter Webber was set to produce her directorial debut, a revenge action- thriller set in Cairo.

Eighteen months later, however, and Al-Maria isn’t at the Venice International Film Festival discussing the snippets of the film she called Beretta. Instead, we’re in a gallery space at Manchester’s Cornerhouse arts venue and Beretta has metamorphosed into a sprawling art exhibition called Virgin with a Memory.

There are video installations re-enacting proposed sequences from the film, adapted billboard posters used in the research, fragmented audition tapes, an Arabic translation of the script, imitation music videos and a short film made from the original rushes.

Sophia Al-Maria’s failed film project has morphed into an art exhibition

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