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Image from The Virgin, The Copts and Me, shown at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival
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At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, my personal appreciation grew immensely, for both the “budding” nation of Qatar — if one can use such a word when talking about a country with the highest per-capita income in the world — and one of its most prominent cultural organizations, the Doha Film Institute. An educational and artistic entity — founded by H.E. Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani — within a country where the entire indigenous population is Muslim, the DFI helped to finance Namir Abdel Messeeh’s The Virgin, the Copts and Me, a touching feature walking the line between fiction and documentary, about the complicated dogmas of faith and belief.
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The worldwide poster for the upcoming film Black Gold, directed by Jean Jacques Annaud
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Amanda Palmer photographed by ©Brigitte Lacombe, courtesy of Doha Film Institute
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I sat down with Palmer last May, at the exclusive Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca. She was in town for the Tribeca Film Festival, in her role as executive director of the Doha Film Institute, which hosts the sister festival to TFF in Qatar. In the lobby of the Greenwich, rockstars and movie icons came and went, while Harvey Weinstein sat nearby on his cell phone, undoubtedly closing the next movie deal.
