Monday 23 / December / 2024
Muscat: People in Oman should stop looking at cinema as merely a form of entertainment, says award winning director Maitham Al Musawi.
Today, the Times of Oman is featuring Maitham Al Musawi, an orthopaedic surgeon who loves to shoot movies in his free time, and his thoughts on movie making in its #OmanPride campaign.
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“To promote movies in Oman, people should stop thinking of movies as only something made for entertainment and should accord it the same importance as art forms like music and painting,” Al Musawi told the Times of Oman.
“Only then people will start watching more movies and we can start supporting these financially,” he added. Al Musawi’s short film, ‘Reflections,’ has won three awards in the categories of Best Short Film, Best Director, and Best Child Actress, at the Muscat International Film Festival this year.
“Winning an award is always a great experience. It is a sort of confirmation that the work we are doing is not pointless, especially when a group of experts in the field decide that your work is worth an award,” Al Musawi asserted.
He also said it is not easy to continue pursuing his profession as well as follow his passion but somehow it has been working out for him. Another way to promote movies in Oman is to use films as a medium to promote the country’s tourism.
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“Out of all the Gulf countries, Oman is the only one that has such a diverse geography to attract different film studios to shoot their films here but, unfortunately, that advantage is not being utilised,” he said.
According to him, making films in Oman is not that easy and there is too little support for filmmakers here in the Sultanate.
Explaining how he landed in the field of movie making, Al Musawi said, “Filmmaking is not something I had dreamt to pursue all my life. Rather, it’s something I gradually started leaning towards as the years went by. It started with my love for Hollywood movies and my obsession with photography.” So far, Al Musawi has directed four short narrative films and one short documentary. “Response to my movies has been excellent and this encourages me to do more,” he said.
“A lot of the characters or issues that I discuss in my films are based on what I have seen in my everyday life as a doctor,” said Al Musawi who has won 17 awards in film making, locally and internationally.
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“Topics I choose to discuss in my films help me to achieve a lot of awards, and another factor is that the film comes from Oman, an odd place to see movies coming from,” he said. Speaking about the release of his movies, Al Musawi said, “I usually release my movies at film festivals.”
“Film festivals are the place where I learn from the feedback I receive after the screening of my films from other filmmakers and people who are interested in the field of movie making,” he added.
“Later, these movies are made available online for the public,” Al Musawi continued. Speaking about his future projects, he said, “A couple of my projects are in the pipeline.”
“I have a screenplay called “A Piece of Land” that received funding from the Dubai International Film Festival and I’m planning to shoot in the upcoming months,” Al Musawi said. “I also have a collaboration with the director Sudha Sha on her feature long anthology film in which I will be directing one of the short films in the movie,” he added.
His dream project is to make a commercial film that everyone can watch in the movie theatre.
“Another dream is that one of my movies gets nominated for an Oscar,” Maitham Al Musawi said.
