Arab-Canadian filmmaker Nadda featured in festival

A shapely young woman with a boom box saunters down a narrow urban side street. Finding a spot she likes, she takes off her shoes, sets the music playing and begins to sway to the strains of Arab music. Her movements are sensual, incongruous against the grimy, chipped-brick alley wall behind her. Her leg outstretched through the long skirt-slit and her arms curling around her spangled bodice are intuitively graceful. In the foreground, joggers, pedestrians and traffic go by, oblivious of the belly dancer.

This is "Laila," the first in a series of short films by Arab-Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda which was screened at the Rocky-Mathey Theater last Thursday as part of the Canadian Studies Film Festival.

The films, each just a few minutes long, are all black and white vignettes shot in Toronto, and have played at over 350 film festivals, collectively garnering ten awards over the past five years. This impressive response makes Nadda – like playwright Bina Sharif and comedian Shazia Mirza – one of several rising young female artists of Muslim descent in the West.

"The shorts don't have a beginning, middle, end," Nadda said. "It's not about climax, development. Whatever the audience thought it was about, that's what it was about . . . I don't believe short films should be a calling card for a feature film."

Maybe not, but that's exactly what her portfolio has earned the 31-year-old Toronto resident. In May, she will begin shooting 'Coldwater,' her first full-length film. "It's a fully-financed feature film, a big budget film," she said. "It's exciting because this time I have real financers backing me, real actors, a real crew. But, you know, I'm still trying to show that Arabs are just like everybody else, with the same problems and hopes as everybody else."

Yet in the short films, at least, her protagonists, all Arab-Canadian women, constantly wear a sense of loneliness, of separation from the mainstream. As Nadda said of her own experience, "Growing up, I was never considered Canadian, even though I was born there." The rupture isn't always as blatant as in the case of "Laila," who dances to a rhythm no one else seems to hear. But it's palpable.

In "Do Nothing," for example, an Arab girl stands on a busy sidewalk, accosting white men as they walk by. "Hey mister," she demands of the startled pedestrians in her shrill young voice, "d'you think I'm beautiful? D'you think my ass is beautiful?"

In "Slut," a teenage girl wearing a tight tank-top and miniskirt changes into baggy trousers and a figure-concealing jacket in the elevator of her building. When she reaches her floor, she walks to her apartment to the melancholy reeds of Arab music.

Music also marks the divide between white and Arab Canada in "Wet Heat Drifts Through The Afternoon," in which a young girl sits listlessly by the window, an instrumental track playing in the background. Her mother explains that there is food in the kitchen, then leaves.

Spying the older woman's departure from the window, the girl springs to action: plastering her young face with makeup, getting on a train and smoking companionably with older, white boys, and finally sniffing drugs with her white friends. Her transition from one world to the other is mirrored by the change in the soundtrack, from Middle Eastern classical to hip-hop.

"I'm guilty about all the things I've done to her," Nadda said of her 12-year-old sister, the drug-sniffing truant of "Wet Heat," who is a recurring actor in many of the shorts. "I'm surprised my parents don't hate me! It's a good thing I'm not allowed to use my friends for the feature film – I have to get real stars! Although I will still have my little sister."

Perhaps this reliance on nonprofessional actors hampers the delivery of lines. Or maybe Nadda, a published short story writer on the side, just has a better eye for an evocative setting than an ear for realistic dialogue.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Whatever the explanation, the speech-free vignettes are far more successful and striking than those with conversation. An exchange between two teenage girls at a bus stop – "Boyfriend Trouble" – is trite, its sighs melodramatically heavy. In "Thanks for listening," a woman tells a man with whom she had a one-night stand, the line smacking of relationship guides and Hallmark.

In "Black September," a woman whose sister writes to her for the first time in 14 years to inform her of their father's death fluctuates between hyperbolic anger and wooden gravity. "I have been fighting since I was four," she announces to her daughter, with a stilted, self-conscious solemnity.

It doesn't help that the films were shot on a tight budget – often just $500, and frame-snipping by Nadda herself. "I had to cut corners," remembers Nadda. "And one of the corners we cut was sound . . . We shot them on 16mm VHS and the sound is pretty crappy."

Not that the setback dented Nadda's gumption. When she trained at New York University, "they taught us to forget about finances and just tell your story, and I went back to Toronto with that attitude. So the shorts don't have that slickness – and a part of me is proud of that – but I'm also tired of doing it all myself. With this new film, I'll have a professional DOP, professional lighting people, professional everything . . . but I'll still be telling Arab stories."

Will she ever consider telling a different story? "Absolutely – I'll absolutely tell other stories. It's just that this is what I have in me at the moment."