Fatma Al-Ghanim is a Qatari athlete and filmmaker who’s breaking new floor for ladies within the tiny nation and within the Arab world at giant. In 2010, she captained Qatar’s first-ever ladies’s nationwide soccer group. Now, Al-Ghanim is on the Tribeca Film Festival with “Theatre of Dreams,” a robust quick that marks her directorial and performing debut and exposes the fierce cultural opposition to ladies taking part in soccer in Qatar from her private prism.
Set in opposition to the backdrop of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and impressed by her real-life story, “Theatre of Dreams” delves into why the nation’s feminine nationwide soccer group — which was created in 2009 as Qatar was making ready to bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup — has been inactive since 2014 and is at the moment unranked within the FIFA world rating.
Segueing from her soccer profession, Al-Ghanim grew to become one of many first Qatari ladies to compete in a triathlon, later serving as the primary feminine board member of the Qatar Triathlon Federation. She additionally began working for the Doha Movie Institute, which led to her directorial debut.
Under, Al-Ghanim speaks to Selection concerning the drive to make “Theatre of Dreams” after suppressing the trauma brought on by her expertise spearheading feminine soccer in Qatar. As she places it: “Something was stirring in me, and if it didn’t come out, my body was going to turn on me.”
This movie is clearly very private. What prompted you to wish to inform this story?
I labored on the Doha Movie Institute and was making an attempt to get into filmmaking ultimately. The most important catalyst got here throughout the 2022 World Cup. Numerous worldwide journalists, who had heard that there was a ladies’s soccer group and had been on the lookout for athletes to interview to speak concerning the ladies’s aspect of the sport, reached out to me. I’ve had unbelievable achievements in triathlon and have been supported to succeed in the world stage in that sport. However the issue that we face as Qatari ladies in sports activities and Arab ladies in sports activities, it’s so nuanced. It has nothing to do with the truth that the establishments or the nation don’t assist ladies’s sports activities. The challenges are actually extra nuclear, within the household and society. So when the World Cup got here up, I couldn’t keep away from coping with this trauma anymore.
Inform me extra.
The whole metropolis was dressed with billboards of [male] gamers that regarded bigger than life. I needed to drive via them every single day, and it began to stir one thing in me. I used to be feeling responsible for not doing extra for the game. The Qatar Soccer Affiliation had requested me to start out taking over a larger function in ladies’s soccer [soccer]. However I began to really feel that doing that as a supervisor wasn’t going to assist the true difficulty. The actual change needed to be a mindset change, one that might break that taboo of concern that households have. What does it imply for for ladies to play a sport that’s largely related to male domination? All of that began to make me really feel like one thing was stirring in me, and if it didn’t come out, my physique was going to activate me.
There’s a robust second in your movie once you see the Qatar ladies’s soccer group taking part in on TV and also you hear male voices making feedback in Arabic translated within the subtitles as: “Congrats… we now have dykes and trannies on TV!” Was this line drawn from actuality?
Sure, these strains had been taken word-for-word from dialogue boards. These boards additionally had a whole lot of supportive feedback. So individuals had been combating [about the issue] forwards and backwards. However once you attain that stage of negativity, you understand you’re breaking a cultural taboo and that you’re being the primary to take action. So that is actually a narrative about what it takes to be the primary, and the price that comes with breaking a barrier. You already know, typically even when it’s a win, it doesn’t appear like a win on the time. However somebody must be the primary to interrupt via that barrier, and it doesn’t at all times find yourself in an enormous triumph and a trophy and a comeback story. For the longest time, I had a difficulty telling my very own story, as a result of I by no means felt prefer it actually ended with a win. Then I noticed, properly, really it does. As a result of I’m nonetheless right here and I’m nonetheless speaking about it. And the act of placing myself in entrance of the digicam, and selecting visibility relatively than being intimidated, and proudly owning that vulnerability. That’s one thing that now I’m utterly proudly owning.
“Theatre of Dreams.”
Courtesy Doha Movie Institute
This interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
