Filmmaking in the Middle East is burgeoning, a fact proven by the high number of entries from the region in this year’s Festival, as well as the long list of stories in the trades chronicling new festivals, new productions, and emerging Mideast talent.

Despite this good news, filmmaking in the Middle East is anything but easy. Take the travails of Jackie Reem Salloum, a Palestinian filmmaker based in New York best known for her satiric short Planet of the Arabs. Salloum’s Sundance entry, Slingshot Hip Hop, profiles several Palestinian hip-hop artists and the significance of their music to audiences of all ages in the region.

“I had to get permission from Israel to even enter Gaza,” she said as she described just some of her struggles during the six shoots she organized over the course of five years. “The only reason I got in was due to the generosity of some organizations who vouched for me. Then, once I'm in – and you’ve got to remember that Gaza is only 26 miles long and four miles wide – to travel between towns and cities can be either a matter of minutes, a matter of hours, or completely impossible because the military decided that day to just close the checkpoint. I started out wanting to focus on the music but these imposed divisions and difficulties to connect became a main theme of the film.”

For Sabiha Sumar, co-writer and co-director of the portrait of politics in Pakistan titled Dinner With the President: A Nation’s Journey, the challenges started with the total lack of filmmaking infrastructure in her country. “With every film we have to build that infrastructure, create it from the whole cloth, literally,” she explained. “I normally work with a DP and sound person from Holland – and they bring the camera and sound equipment – and then I hire people as assistants for them here, and with every film I host a workshop where I train these people. I feel that I want to contribute to building this infrastructure this way, although my efforts are very small. But it’s really a desert and we are building everything from scratch.”

The crew for Amin Matalqa’s narrative feature, Captain Abu Raed, also came from outside Jordan, where the film was shot. “They came from all over,” he said, “from Lebanon, Tunisia, Germany, Morocco.” He noted that several Jordanians had worked on Brian De Palma’s film, Redacted, and then went on to work with him on his film, finally moving over to work on Katherine Bigelow’s film, The Hurt Locker, which was shot in Amman. “We were careful to time our shoot so as not to overlap with Brian De Palma’s shoot,” said Matalqa. “Otherwise we would not have had any resources.”

Matalqa also recounted some of the creative thinking needed to make do. His crew cobbled together a picture car, for example since there was not one available, and the lack of soundstages meant that they had to build their own, shooting all the interiors for the film in a single house. “We built these flats to divide the rooms,” he said, “and we ended up calling the house the ‘Abu Raed Studio.’”

While Matalqa may have had to do without for some things, the lack of filmmaking infrastructure worked in his favor in a few instances. “We were able to use the entire airport, because we’re a Jordanian film,” he recalled, adding that for him, one of the biggest differences between shooting in Jordan and somewhere like Los Angeles or New York is that the process is new. “Whereas people in L.A. find all of this very intrusive, people in Jordan were very welcoming.”

One of the most disruptive challenges faced by many Middle East filmmakers is war. For Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv, war became a key plot point in their film, Strangers, which follows an Israeli man (Lubna Azabal) and a Palestinian woman (Liron Levo) as they fall in love during the World Cup finals in Germany in the summer of 2006. “We wanted to shoot in real places, and to capture real emotion,” said Nattiv, speaking from Tel Aviv. “Luckily, the actress and the actor had a wonderful chemistry, and most of the first half of the film is improvised.” He added, “And then what really happened was that the war [between Israel and Lebanon] started after the World Cup Finals ended. We were going to make a very romantic love story, but then reality was stronger. The war got inside our film.”

A real-time war also got inside Lebanese filmmaker Philippe Aractingi’s Under the Bombs, a gripping portrait of a woman (Nada Abou Farhat) and a taxi driver (Georges Khabbaz) as they search for someone in the war-torn countryside just after the Israeli attacks on Lebanon during the same 2006 war. Speaking in an interview during the Venice Film Festival, Aractingi said, “This film was done upside down. It was first shot and then written.” He continued, “We did this because the war started and I felt that there was an urgency to be a witness to what was happening. I was in a way called, or felt like I had to talk about the dead people who were going innocently.” The film intercuts footage of the war with the story of the pair’s search, and the result is a powerful – and very real – account of the disruption and loss of war.

Middle Eastern filmmakers also face the challenge of storytelling, and what kind of story to tell. As one of possibly only a handful of films that may be produced in a given year in their country, should these films speak for their nation or region? Captain Abu Raed, for example, is essentially a story about the brutal effects of poverty and the role of the imagination and kindness in overcoming those effects; as such, it’s a story that transcends national boundaries. This was entirely intentional, Matalqa said. “I wanted to make a very Hollywood movie in a way, because I wanted something that’s not an art film, nor a film about religion or politics. I wanted to do something timeless.”

For Sabiha Sumar, however, the specificity of Pakistan is the foundation of all of her filmmaking, and that has tremendous power as well. “We do a traveling cinema with our films in Pakistan because there’s no way to see the films here,” she explained. “So we take the films to very remote areas, and whenever we’ve shown these kinds of controversial films, it’s the most thrilling part of the process because women get up and say, ‘This character is me, and now I have found a voice through your film. I’ve found words, and ways to tell you my story.’ And that’s so amazing, that’s so touching.”

Similarly, filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian opted to tell a true story, namely about homosexuality in Iran in Be Like Others. Homosexuality is punishable by death there, but homosexuals can opt for sex-change operations, thus maintaining the demand for clear gender demarcation. The powerful film follows several people as they grapple with gender, power, violence, and shame within an unforgiving national context.

Jordanian/Palestinian filmmaker Al Massad’s doc Recycle also confronts politcal realities by chronicling the impetus for terrorism in a specific place, namely Zarqa, Jordan’s second-largest city. The film introduces us to a man as he tries to get by in a tough neighborhood.

In all of these films, generalized stereotypes often seen in American media become subtle stories of individuals. “I really appreciate the humanizing qualities of these films,” said Caroline Libresco, Senior Programmer at the Festival. “Each one of them offers a really different take on an intractable issue, with the filmmakers bringing whole new points of view to stories of conflict. You have nuanced characters and nuanced situations, and it’s nice to showcase these rather than the black and white perspectives we so often see. I think that’s really what cinema can do.”

Looking toward the future, things look brighter generally for filmmakers in the Middle East. Since 2005, The Sundance Middle East Screenwriters Lab has hosted writers from the region to develop their stories with the help of seasoned advisors. And the University of Southern California and Jordan’s Royal Film Commission are creating the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts in the town of Aqaba, set to open next fall. Major film festivals in Dubai (now in its fifth year) and Abu Dhabi (launched in 2007), both featuring cash prizes, bode well, and in Dubai, a helpful co-production market designed to foster Arab film production. Several countries boasted higher production numbers in 2007, including Jordan and Egypt.

Reflecting on the difficulties faced by these filmmakers, Alesia Weston, the Sundance Institute’s Associate Director in the Feature Film Program, commented, “There are new labs, new markets, new festivals and some money, and so these things are coming, but what’s most important is that people are realizing that there are very exciting stories to tell here, stories that feel different and yet, paradoxically, connect us by both showing commonalities and illuminating differences.”