VENICE: Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar has brought a powerful first feature to the Venice film festival, a Western-style story of coming of age starring Bedouins living in the desert.
"Theeb" is set in 1916 in a far-flung corner of the Ottoman Empire during the Great Arab revolt, a period of upheaval which saw Bedouin livelihoods and culture threatened by a newly-built pilgrim railway which ran from Damascus to Medina.
It stars Bedouin boy Jacir Eid as Theeb ("Wolf"), a youngster who tags along uninvited when his older brother agrees to accompany a British army officer on a danger-fraught mission to a water well deep in the desert.
The stunning but inhospitable land has become the hunting ground of Ottoman mercenaries, Arab revolutionaries and Bedouin raiders, and the young Theeb is soon forced to decide whether or not to join forces with a murderer in a bid to survive.
New talent Nowar told journalists in Venice he spent over a year living with the tribe to prepare for the film, a Jordanian, Britain, UAE and Qatar co-production funded in part by the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and Doha Film Institute.
"The Bedouin culture has lots of things that make it a ripe subject for a Western. We filmed near the Wadi Rum valley in southern Jordan -- a wild terrain, a lawless place in 1916, where people must take morality into their own hands," Nowar said.
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