At the end of the 60s of the last century, a number of eminent people in Qatar submitted a request to establish a public shareholding company for cinema under the supervision and control of the State. A meeting of a number of merchants was held in Doha Secondary School, and thus the Qatar Cinema Company was established, two cinemas were purchased as a start.
Najdi said: "We first started negotiating to buy Amir and Al Andalus cinemas, then we brought Iraqi engineers to design it, and the first chairman of its board of directors was HE Sheikh Jassim bin Khalid Al-Thani, and this is how cinema began in Qatar.
The critic Abdulrahman Najdi explained that the establishment of a media department in 1969 and the opening of Qatar TV in 1970, the establishment of the Qatari Ministry of Information in 1974, then the establishment of a documentary film unit affiliated with Qatar TV in 1981, which was supervised by the late director Ismail Khalid, all these contributed to the production of a group of long and short documentaries and feature films, as these films took several forms, ranging from the lifestyles that were associated with the sea at that time, to the traditions that characterized Qatari society.
The critic Najdi enumerates a number of films such as the movie "Al Shiraa" (1967), produced by Qatar TV, whose story revolves around the relationship between man and the wild sea, and the film won Shalimar award. He also mentioned the movie "Diving" (1980), which is one of the most important films of that era, in which it recorded the details of the diving trip and the extraction of pearls, in addition to the movie "Al-Dana" (1981), which won the Best Film Award at the Carthage Film Festival in 1982.
He also narrated a number of films, the most important of which is the film "Plastic Arts" (1985), which is a vivid panorama that chronicles the march of a number of pioneers of plastic art in Qatar, such as Youssef Ahmed, the late Jassim Zaini, Hassan Al Mulla and others.
General Manager of Qatar Cinema noted that these films, with different visions and aspirations, provided an opportunity to see Qatar at an important stage in its modern history, where the honor of preserving the culture of that glorious era in the history of the State of Qatar is attributed to it.
He pointed out that years passed and the cinema movement was almost stopped, especially the period between the mid-1980s and the end of the 1990s, but with the beginning of the current millennium, cinema was strongly present following the return of a generation of Qatari youth studying the arts and sciences of cinema in America, Egypt and elsewhere. They have already achieved a number of promising cinematic films that won a number of awards and honors, and put their cinema on the international regional arena.
He added that the cinema did not continue its activity with the same enthusiasm with which it began, attributing this to a number of reasons, including that the Qatari youth may not have had a party that would adopt their cinematic project, by creating a cinema that honestly and transparently addresses the issues of the problems and aspirations of the Qatari man, and emphasizes the national identity of this cinema. At the end they were satisfied with the government job and left their dreams of making cinema, even if for a while. (MORE)