Coming soon Encounters on the road to heritage and film in the UAE

Focusing on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this research explores if film and visual media can create or enforce a collective memory and heritage for a relatively new nation state seeking international status in business, tourism and geopolitics, while unifying its citizenry, who only make up just 10% of the population, through a collective identity. This research focuses on a 10-year window, beginning in 2008, when the UAE government began to invest heavily in developing a film industry, and ending in 2018, when most of these early film initiatives had disappeared. It is also the time frame during which this new nation state, formed from seven emirates in 1971, intensified its move onto the world stage and navigated a potentially catastrophic financial crisis and the turbulent times of the Arab Spring. At the same time, not coincidentally, this was a decade when heritage became a buzzword, a period often referred to as the beginning of the heritage boom era, including on television, in a landscape that does not have any physical landmarks of its struggle to become a nation, such as battlefields, and very little in the way of manmade heritage landmarks that date back even to the founding of the nation in 1971.