Collaboration and conviviality in Dubai


Collaboration and conviviality in Dubai
Film still: Cast members for the play "DNA" preparing for Short+Sweet Theatre Festival, Dubai

Bangalore filmmaker Mir Imran’s documentary ‘Beyond Boundaries’ features stories of friendship between Pakistanis and Indians — a welcome respite from the divisive narrative propagated by politicians and media

By Anshuman Chadda

REVIEW

Documentary film: Beyond Boundaries, 2015, 21 min
Director: Mir Imran, India
Cinematography: Kamalesh Keserker
Editor: Mark Stanley
Script and narration: Frank Dullaghan

“For me, as a doctor, nationality and religion have no importance at all”, declares Kolkata physician Dr. Manodip Acharyya in Beyond Boundaries, a documentary by Indian director Mir Imran.

Dr Acharyya’s sentiments are fairly representative of the other people featured in Imran’s film, which focuses on stories of cooperation and camaraderie between Indians and Pakistanis in the cosmopolitan city of Dubai.

The filmmaker documents individual Indians and Pakistanis across occupations and economic hierarchies who come together to help each other as they make Dubai their home.

Life in Dubai, a city of migrant workers, tends to facilitate a cross-pollination of ideas, encounters, and friendships between those who may otherwise consider each other enemies.

Be it the physician from Kolkata, the barber from Rawalpindi, or the Pakistani grocer who greets his Indian customers with a Namaste, Imran’s film narrates many such stories beautifully and from the heart.

Hailing from Bangalore, Imran Mir, 31, has been in Dubai for about six years now. “These stories of cooperation and friendship are extremely common in Dubai. Even the making of this movie was propelled by one kind gesture of a Lahori cab driver,” he tells me over the telephone.

Dubai-based Indo-Pak couple Adil and Sana enjoying a cricket match.

Still from the film: Dubai-based Indo-Pak couple Adil and Sana enjoying a cricket match.

He says he has a habit of scribbling thoughts in a small notebook. While doing this in a cab one day, he left his pen behind as he got out. “Now it was a simple, inexpensive pen, nothing fancy… But what happened later left a deep impression on me,” he relates.

The Pakistani cab driver found the pen and came looking for Imran in the building where he had dropped “It was such a simple and non-extravagant gesture, but it left me in tears. It was then that I wanted to do my bit by sharing these everyday stories of cooperation that happen in Dubai,” says Imran.

There are many such stories of collaboration and conviviality – from fashion designers to barbers or from theatre artists to doctors, spanning professions or gentry – in this refreshingly authentic film.

As politicians from both countries continue to propagate a divisive narrative that even the media echoes in hawkish overtones, the positive stories featured in Imran’s Beyond Boundaries are inspirational, and a welcome respite.

Indeed, as the movie narrates about a married Indo-Pak couple, “There are no boundaries to love, there should be no boundary to life!”

Delhi-born Anshuman Chadda is a primary-care MD and a Harvard-trained public health innovator. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA, and serves as the Global Entrepreneur-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts where he mentors student and faculty healthcare startups. He is also a trained singer in Indian classical music.




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