The Dubai in Me

The Dubai in me - a film by Christian von Borries

it's all online
Part one is here. You'll be able to find parts 2-9 from there.

from the Dubai in Me website:

"At the heart of the saga - the Dubai debacle. (Nouriel Roubini)

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neoliberal globalized world that may be crashing - at last - into the sands.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it seems, nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place - but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship." (Huffington Post)

Dubai or Palestine, Hanoi or Dubai: this film shows how wrong this antithesis is.

This film is searching for a new topography.

This film is a metaphore, a displacement, a shift where territories are marked, where things are seen, where they are given names and meaning. In this sense, the metaphoric task of cinema can be seen as subverting a previous metaphorical order, namely the official mapping of space and time. An order that defines places, that defines what has to be seen and done in those places, the way they are inhabited, their capacities and incapacities.

Tthe constructed picture of poverty and disgrace tends to take the edge of reality and should be preserved from any form of aesthetisation. Otherwise we make them acceptable and attractive.

Fiction and beauty should be the part of the rich, dull reality and the objectivity of the documentary look the part of the poor."