By Noura Saad
ABU DHABI — Zayed University Middle East Film Festival provides an awesome chance for students to show their abilities in creating movies. I attended ZUMEFF on its first day, April 30. I saw a lot of movies, including documentary, narrative and animation. I recommend ZU students view a short movie titled “Lightless” by Ashma Guaiamadin of the Doha Film Institute at Qatar University. The film opened ZUMEFF 2017 at the ZU-AD Convention Centre.
“Lightless” is a 15-minute documentary that narrates the story of a Filipina girl who moves with her family to live in Qatar when she is 5. Ms. Guiamadin, a student at QU who majors in integrated strategic communication, is interested in the Milky Way and photographs of it. The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our solar system and many more solar systems. The descriptive “milky” is derived from the appearance from Earth of the galaxy — a band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
The movie is about two young women, Ashma and Fatima, who are undergraduates at university. They are in a restaurant when they decide to go camping in the desert in order to see Milky Way and take pictures of it. There they will learn how to do night sky photography.
They go to a faraway place between the borders of Qatar and Saudi Arabia because of the darkness there and that will help them see Milky Way clearly. The camping is awesome. The two cannot sleep, they are so excited. Instead, the stay up all night so as to capture the most beautiful pictures of Milky Way. They produce nice photographs, and then Asma posts pictures on her blog.
The quality of the acting is excellent. The music was fitting with the scenes of the movie and the voices of the actors. The lighting in the movie is sound. They shot the movie with high-quality cameras and used the sun to give nice effects.
Film at a glance:
Title: “Lightless”
Director: by Asma Guiamadin, Qatar University
Genre: documentary
Length: 15 minutes
This story was originally published on May 9, 2017. It was re-uploaded on Jan. 1, 2021.
