THIS weekend in America moviegoers will be transported to the Middle East, one way or another. Over the long holiday weekend (Memorial Day in the US, a big movie release time frame), this comes courtesy of a pair of franchise films aimed at different audiences. Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema both hope to lead the way with their comedy sequel “Sex and the City 2”, which takes the stylish gals to Abu Dhabi, while Disney counter-programmes with the fantasy effects-driven adventure tale “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time”, which offers a different type of fun in the desert. Both films though are lying to their audience in big way, though. The girls of “Sex and the City 2” ��" Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda ��" decide to leave their home town and take off to some exotic place; this time their destination is Abu Dhabi. During the trip, we see the desert fashionistas walking in the Sahara, lunching under a Bedouin tent, and partying with belly dancers at a local nightclub in Abu Dhabi. In reality though, all these scenes were actually shot in Morocco, since the officials at Abu Dhabi and Dubai banned the producers from filming in the cities. There's some unintentional irony in the fact that when the girls claim to be shopping in “Old Abu Dhabi”, when there is no such thing, since there is nothing “older” than a little over half a century in the Emirates except sand. Which makes one wonder why they didn't just change the script to say “X old city of Morocco”, since Casablanca was good enough for the classic movie of the same name. It almost seems to imply that all locations in the Middle East are identical and interchangeable. The second film, “Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time”, on the other hand, has been called racist because of its casting choice. Let's think this out a bit. “Prince of Persia” tells the story of Prince, a fine young man who hails from Persia. Rather than trying to find someone of Persian (or at the very least, Middle Eastern) descent, the film's producers instead went with a well-known Hollywood actor (Jake Gyllenhall). Is there anything wrong with that, really? My guess is that the average American doesn't know that Persia = Iran. If they did, we'd be hearing the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck railing on and on about how the movie glorifies Iranian civilisation and “Real Americans” obviously hate everything Iranian. That's nothing new though, it's a random desert location which could be anywhere, same thing with “Sex and the City”. This follows a long tradition of setting part of the Middle East or any other Middle Eastern country as the subtitle for another one. One of the most famous examples is the film “Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981). All scenes that were supposed to be filmed in Egypt were actually filmed in Tunisia. There's no great blame on filmmakers here actually, because this not is some sort of racist vendetta or anything. The same sort of thing happens in America itself. Many of the movies that are supposed to take place in “American state X” a lot of the time ends up being filmed in Canada because it's cheaper to film, and the country makes it easier to actually film there. The film ‘Fair Game” (2010) starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, which was in competition during the 63rd edition of the Cannes film festival, was shot in Cairo and Amman, but the production actually pulled out early from the Egypt because they had a hard time acquiring all the permits. Another film set in Egypt, “The Mummy” (1999), apparently could not be shot in Egypt at the time because of the unstable political conditions, whatever that was, at the time. Egypt is not known for making life easy for foreign film productions; a lot of Hollywood studios are afraid to come here because of the ongoing problems in Iraq and Palestine. This might sound strange to some, since shooting a film in Egypt shouldn't have anything to do with the political situations in neighbouring countries, but because people don't have a great understanding of how life or politics work in the Middle East, a lot of Middle East-set films end up being shot in Morocco. To be pragmatic though, the country really does know how to market itself much better than Egypt does. Even their film festival, the International Film Festival of Marrakech, has established itself in a short period of time as much more relevant than the Cairo International film festival, even though Morocco doesn't even approach Egypt in number of films made per annum. Egyptian media has not been doing a great job to make Egypt a popular place for foreign film production; for years there has been much discussion about Egyptian productions collaborating with foreign production, but there has been no real talk about making it easier for foreign productions to shoot in Egypt. This is peculiar, since the benefits that would result from foreign filmmaking, both financial and otherwise, would be great. After 9/11, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg made legal changes so that film productions could get a huge tax break, when shooting their film in New York City. Robert De Niro co-founded The Tribeca Film Festival to attract international attention, which has become a great success. When a new studio (Steiner Studios) opened in Brooklyn, New York, Bloomberg, along with the borough president Marty Markowitz, made several other legal changes for the borough in order to better accommodate the film shoots. This is what needs to be done in Egypt; each city's governor needs to have laws that will make it easier for foreign films to shoot in the country. They need to become more inviting. In a way, we would actually be using the one of the most powerful media forms in the world (Hollywood) to our benefit.
