Almotamar Net - When Bader Ben Hirsi planned to make a feature film about women in Yemen, he never imagined the reaction would be so hostile.

Angry men stormed the set during filming in the capital Sanaa, husbands prevented their actress wives from taking part and actors were insulted in the streets.

Despite these problems, "A Brand New Day in Old Sanaa" was made, becoming conservative Yemen's first full-length offering to the global film industry.

"The papers said we were doing pornography in mosques, or that we were with the CIA or Mossad. On the first day (shooting) we were stopped by a group calling itself the Sons of Old Sanaa. I told them, I'm a Yemeni too," ben Hirsi told Reuters.

Once he had assembled a cast, the London-based documentary maker had to spend five months training them to act in ways other than the theatrical style seen in many soap operas across the Arab world. Even that posed problems.

"It was UK-style drama training -- pretending to be animals or trees -- and people were overhearing them doing this. The actors did get some verbal abuse," Ben Hirsi said after a screening at the Dubai International Film Festival this week.

Yet the movie has won over Arab audiences because of its retention of some soap-style acting alongside the art-house cinema style not often seen in mainstream Arab films.

One minute old veiled women on the streets gesticulate as they gossip about a girl's bad reputation, and then Ben Hirsi takes us into the sensual inner sanctum of female society employing a lush palette of colors with his camera.

All this is set against a soundtrack that moves from disco funk to classical Arabic, making light of the heavy reality of crushing social mores that can ruin the dreams of many youth.

ARAB WORLD CLICHES

The plot centers on a young man called Tarek who considers shunning a high society arranged marriage to run away with a "low-caste" girl, played by a young Lebanese actress.
"I'm from Yemen and I want to thank you so much," one young man told Ben Hirsi afterwards. "I'm like Tarek. He at least had a chance to cheat the system. I don't. That's why I cry."

Ben Hirsi and his producer Ahmed Abdali, another London-based Yemeni, said they wanted to avoid the cliches found in many Western films about Arabs, where he said the funders often have demands about how Arab society should be represented.

"They have their conditions when you get the funding. With this one it was completely independent. There was no major funder who could make their conditions," Abdali said.

"Arab films around the world titillate the senses, or there's something against Islam, or about Palestine, and it becomes political propaganda."

Despite being dominated by men in public, the women in private are shown as beautiful, cunning and in charge.

The other major star of the film is Sanaa itself, a city in the mountains of Yemen with its distinctive architecture and intriguing alleyways. The U.N. cultural body UNESCO lists Sanaa's "old city" as a world heritage site.

Now with the country presented in such a flattering light, Yemen's media is praising the film, which has gained an award in Egypt, Ben Hirsi said.

"It has had two screenings in Yemen and they loved it, which was nice," he said.