Support 'urgently needed' for local documentaries

A UAE documentary maker has described the lack of local support for natural-history films as distressing.

Jonathan Ali Khan, a British filmmaker living and working in Dubai, said the need for regional channels to invest in such programming was "matter of urgency".

"Generations are growing up with hardly any exposure to the natural world," Mr Khan said.

"Television may well be the only means through which they can experience the amazing wildlife that inhabits our region."

Mr Khan is best-known for his TV series Arabia's Cycle of Life, which reached 25 million viewers in the Middle East and North Africa when it was broadcast in Arabic on Al Arabiya and in English on Showtime in 2005, and on Animal Planet in 2006.

The success prompted him to produce a follow-up, but production was abandoned because of a funding shortfall.

"I find it very distressing that the region's natural heritage just doesn't seem to stimulate any interest from TV channels here," Mr Khan said.

The government-owned TV station Dubai One said environmental programmes were important for creating awareness.

But a spokesman for the station admitted: "In a region where entertainment is king, there could be a challenge for these programmes to be commercially attractive."

The Dubai Press Club report Arab Media Outlook 2009-2013said advertising revenues in the Arab region, valued at US$4.6 billion (Dh16.89bn), were low compared with other markets.

And while most Arab countries have found local content to be more popular with consumers, the same is not true in the UAE, the report said.

"This is particularly true of those countries with a strong history in content production, such as Egypt, where 63 per cent of users prefer content from their own country," it said.

"By contrast, in those countries that have only recently moved into the field, such as the UAE, this figure reduces to 20 per cent."

Rohit D'Silva, the regional general manager of National Geographic Abu Dhabi (NGAD), said locally produced documentaries were not considered unless they passed quality control and matched the channel's ethos.

"What people often forget is that our role is to build audiences, so we need to look at the entire gamut of what it takes to make people watch," said Mr D'Silva.

NGAD, an Arabic-language channel, was launched in June 2009 and is placed in the top 15 channels in the UAE.

Mr Khan, who has lived in the UAE for 26 years, said the presence of National Geographic in the region offered a great opportunity for filmmakers, who had been "trying to position natural history content into mainstream media platforms for ages".

But he said it would only be possible if NGAD encouraged and supported local content creation.

Mr D'Silva said he did not want to disclose how much of NGAD's $100 million budget was focused on funding local productions, but it was sufficient "to say that we've produced around 25 hours of programming around the region".

"We've done a bit but there's definitely room to do more," he said, adding it was "not just about going out to film. It's about working with people to create stories and programming that can stand out on a regional and global level."

Dubai TV, which is also run by the Government, screens a weekly documentary from the BBC as a public service, but it also admits environmental shows are "not commercially interesting".

However, Khulud Abu Homos, the senior vice president of programming and creative services for Orbit Showtime Network, said natural history films were crucial to its programming. The satellite broadcaster is planning to next month screen a documentary produced in the region, titled Love GCC, which takes viewers on an environmental journey through the Gulf.

"Issues such as global warming have become household topics of interest and we are increasingly finding that there is a large appetite for 'edutainment' in the Middle East," Mr Homos said.

Mr Khan, who runs the Dubai film-production company Wild Planet Productions, is shooting a three-part series and a one-hour blue-chip film called Sharkquest Arabia - the first in-depth account of the Arabian Sea's little known predator.

Funding for filming has mostly come from overseas.

"It is very frustrating because the whole point is to make educational content for this society to benefit from," Mr Khan said.

molson@thenational.ae