Emirati director Nujoom Al Ghanem up for Muhr award

A second Emirati director is in the running for a prestigious Muhr award at this year’s Dubai International Film Festival.

Nujoom Al Ghanem has been nominated for her documentary Nearby Sky, which was supported by the festival’s Enjaaz post-production fund and will receive its world premiere at DIFF. The film is about Fatima Ali Al Hameli, the first Emirati woman camel owner to take part in the camel beauty pageant and camel auctions in Abu Dhabi.

Nearby Sky is one of seven announced in the second round of films competing for the Muhr Feature Awards, which were launched in 2006 with the aim of nurturing filmmakers from the region.

The others are Khalil Al Mozian’s Gaza-set Sara 2014, about the making of a film about the victim of an honour killing; Salim Abu Jabal’s documentary Roshmia, about a refugee couple in their 80s; Mohammed Rashed Buali’s The Sleeping Tree, the story of a Bahraini couple’s marriage breakdown; Diaries of a Flying Dog, directed by Bassem Fayad, a documentary about a man and his dog who share obsessive compulsive anxiety disorder; the Syrian painter and filmmaker Hazem Alhamwi’s From My Syrian Room, about the plight of the Syrian people; and Trip Along Exodus, the director Hind Shoufani’s story of her father Elias Shoufani, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, academic writer and historian.

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Emirati director Nujoom Al Ghanem up for Muhr award