Filmmaking in the Gulf is often positioned as a new phenomenon, something that began 15 years ago with government film initiatives in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and is emerging now in Saudi Arabia. But filming in the Gulf goes back to the early days of the moving camera, although rarely in the hands of Gulf filmmakers. In 2013, the Dubai International Film Festival asked 475 filmmakers, film critics, and film academics to select the 100 most important Arabic-language films in the 100-plus years of Arab filmmaking. There was only one film from a Gulf filmmaker on the list: “Bas ya Bahar” (“The Cruel Sea”), by Kuwaiti director Khaled Al Siddiq. Made in 1971, “Bas ya Bahar” is also considered the first narrative feature film helmed by a Gulf national, and it notably marked the film acting debut of two of Kuwait’s now legendary theater and television actors, Hayat Al Fahad and Saad Al Faraj. The two actors play the parents of a young man (Mohammed Al Mansour) determined to follow in his father’s steps and become a pearl diver despite their pleas not to. But desperate to make money to marry his neighbor Noura (Amal Bakr), who is from a wealthier family, he tragically disobeys their wishes.

A Hidden Masterpiece 

The Dubai International Film Festival list, even 11 years later, has revived interest in the film –and generated the somewhat unanswerable question, “Where can I see the film?” Siddiq passed away in 2021 without leaving the film in the hands of a distributor. A wiry, witty man, he had a free-spirited demeanor except when it came to his films, resulting in his work falling into relative obscurity. As the Gulf became more conscious of developing its history and heritage, including its film heritage, Siddiq declined interviews and the sharing of his films for what he called “legal reasons.”

He was so protective of “Bas ya Bahar” that he hand delivered the DVD when it screened at New York University Abu Dhabi in 2018. And he asked for the DVD to be returned to him before the question-and-answer segment. That screening would turn out to be Siddiq’s last public appearance in which he told the story of the making of the film. Born in 1945 into a merchant family, Siddiq was educated at St. Peter’s High School in Bombay in the pre-oil era. He began his introduction to filmmaking by volunteering at film studios in India. He then went against his father’s wishes that he focus on the merchant trading business and started to make films. Siddiq directed several short films in the 1960s, starting in 1965 with “Alia wa Isam,” a star-crossed love story based on a Bedouin poem. He acted in several of his films – and financed them all himself. “I even sold some land to make ‘Bas ya Bahar,’” he said in 2018. “But no one in Kuwait saw my final cut back then.”

That is because the film reflects the time it was made. Often called the era of New Arab Cinema, during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the influence of Italian realism and the response to political upheavals combined to create a body of independent Arab films that included traces of Arab melodrama but pushed the envelope by looking at forgotten or undocumented histories and class and gender differences. Consequently, many of these films were censored or banned from being screened in the Arab world. The visually rich “Bas ya Bahar” was no exception. Despite the film winning the FIPRESCI award from the International Federation of Film Critics at the Venice Film Festival in its debut and going on to win awards at international film festivals in Chicago, Tehran, Damascus, and Carthage, Kuwait censored the film because of a chillingly edited scene portraying sexual violence intercut with women dancing and ululating yalwa (cleansing and cleaning ritual) at a wedding.

“It qualifies as a classic,” said Hind Mezaina, an Emirati artist and writer who has curated several film programs. “It taps into a history of the Gulf that I think many avoid or sugarcoat in terms of the pre-oil days … It’s an important film from a historical perspective and from a geographical perspective. There are just so few films from the region of its quality that it deserves to be protected, preserved, and restored for future generations.”

Siddiq only directed one other feature film, “The Wedding of Zein,” set in a fictional African village and based on a story by acclaimed Sudanese writer Tayeb Saleh. It was selected for the Cannes Film Festival Director’s Fortnight in 1976 but is also out of circulation.

“He was one of the first Kuwaiti filmmakers to shoot a feature film outside Kuwait, with ‘Wedding of Zein,’ in Sudan,” said Najat AlSheridah, a Kuwaiti film scholar. “His efforts not only demonstrated innovation but also aimed to transcend borders, attracting global audiences and showcasing Gulf perspectives on a broader stage.”

In 1990, Siddiq was editing a feature, “Shaheen of Winter and Summer,” filmed in Italy and Asia, but stopped working on it when some of the raw footage was destroyed during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He never released the film.

The Legacy of “Bas ya Bahar”

“Bas ya Bahar” remains Siddiq’s legacy film and, for now, the Gulf’s most internationally acclaimed film, despite some scholarly critiques that, while the film boldly recognized gender issues, it glossed over racial and class differences in Kuwaiti society.

From the time Siddiq made “Bas ya Bahar” to the early 2000s, before the Emirati, Qatari, and Saudi governments began investing in film production, only a handful of feature films were made in the Gulf, with most of them only exhibited in cinema clubs and grassroot film cooperatives. Since the Emirati and Qatari governments began investing in film and film festivals in 2006, joined in 2018 by the Saudis, film production has been fostered in the Gulf but has had limited success beyond its borders. Like many film critics, Siddiq was dismissive of what came out of the Gulf following the Emirati and Qatari film initiatives. “Filmmakers in the Gulf today are not taking any risks,” he said in 2018. “You can’t make a great film unless you take some risks.”

It was one of his joys to encourage a new generation. “His films mean everything to me because we young filmmakers grew up not having any filmmakers to look up to except for the films of Siddiq,” said Meqdad Al Kout, a Kuwaiti filmmaker with whom Siddiq shared his short films. “Even though there was a huge generational gap, he still managed to get in touch with us and give us support. Also personally, his experimental short films, plus his appreciation of my films, gave me the confidence to experiment more with the cinema image.”

Financial independence and a desire to protect his work from censorship or illegal distribution were so core to Siddiq’s personality that, in a story he loved to tell, in the early 1970s, when Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, president and founder of the newly formed UAE, asked to see “Bas ya Bahar,” Siddiq delivered it personally. But that is not a luxury most filmmakers can afford, and finances limited his own productivity. He also felt that filmmakers were often left out of the equation when it came to any fees from distribution. Siddiq’s films still exist as part of his estate, but “Bas ya Bahar” has not had a public screening since his death in 2021. Siddiq’s widow is in possession of his work, but the rights to distribution and screening and its restoration remain in limbo. Determined film enthusiasts must settle for degraded film prints on YouTube for now. “Bas ya Bahar,” in its full visual glory, could today be called a masterpiece without an audience.