Ramy Youssef and Mo Amer tackled the question of Hollywood’s portrayal of Arab people in a talk on identity and storytelling at the Doha Film Festival on Tuesday.
The pair were guests of the new festival, spearheaded by Qatar’s Doha Film Institute as an extension of its work focused on nurturing talent and films from the MENA region and Arab diaspora.
The inaugural edition, which comes amid an increasingly flourishing independent film scene across the region, kicked off with a high-powered industry event announcing new partnerships between Qatar’s Film Committee and the likes of Neon, Department M, Sony, Miramax and Company 3.
In response to a question on whether this activity could have a positive impact on the way in which Hollywood portrays Arabs and Muslims, both Youssef and Amer said more needs to be done.
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“If you watch Reel Bad Arabs that’ll tell you everything you need to know,” said Amer, referring to the 2006 documentary Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, which analyzed more than 1,000 films with Arab and Muslim characters made between 1896 and 2000.
“The way we shift that is by putting fuel on the fire all these phenomenal creatives that are here, and people who have great stories to do. You believe in them and you allow them the space and the opportunity to create these stories. We just need more, a lot more. We need to be very aggressive in the way we tell stories and in the quantity,” continued the U.S. actor and comedian who was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents and grew up in Houston.
“There’s a lot of things we can do in film, television, cartoons, even in shadow puppetry. I don’t care what it is, but we have to do it as much as possible to counteract everything that’s happened the last 100 years of how we’ve been depicted on television in the West.”
He pointed to the Arab world’s rich history of storytelling as well as its scientific and technological achievements in the so-called Islamic Age, running from the 8th to the 14th century, as well as its historic figures, whose stories also needed to be told
“It’s extremely important to bring these characters to life, to understand we’re an extremely diverse culture and that we’ve set the standard of many things on this earth. Unfortunately, that’s getting washed to the wayside because we’re not really pushing ourselves to tell these very important stories in the way that will educate them at the same time.”
Youssef suggested that financiers in the Gulf region who were entering into partnerships with Western companies should not be scared of voicing their opinion on the content they were investing in.
“The people who are cutting the checks, there’s a lot more value to you beyond your money. What you think needs to be at that table. From what I’ve seen, I have faith that what is happening in Doha is going to be that way,” said Youssef, who was born in Queens to Egyptian parents and grew up in New Jersey.
“It happens to us all the time. We work for the network. They go, ‘We give you money so we’re going to give you our opinion’… so don’t be shy. The people who are taking the money are used to getting opinions from the people giving the money,” he said.