| Filmmaking is a Business of Building Relationships |
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| with Ruba Nadda | |
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Page 1 of 4 The secret to Ruba Nadda's success as a filmmaker is this: Just keep asking for free stuff. Her reasoning is that if you don't ask, people won't give. Which is how she's made three feature films and 13 shorts while penniless. Director Ruba Nadda and Director of Photography Luc Montpellier on the set of SabahEqually astonishing, she's done it without the formal professional training that most Canadian filmmakers have had - typically either the film program at Ryerson University or a stint at Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre, both in Toronto. Instead, she received a degree in English from York University and took a two-month crash course in filmmaking at New York University. "Insane rebel" methods worked But while her methods left her with the reputation of being an "insane rebel," she says, laughing in astonishment, they also appear to work. Nadda's third feature film Sabah starring Arsinée Khanjian, was released in 2005 and has won international critical acclaim and audience raves. A review in the U.K. publication Film Inside Out said that the movie has such a big heart viewers would want to hug someone after seeing it. At its premiere at the Rotterdam film festival in 2004 Sabah received high marks for being "audience-friendly." Now she's working on Cairo Time, which she hopes will star Meryl Streep, and which will start filming in November 2006 in Egypt. Its projected budget as of early spring 2006 is about $5 million (U.S.). Business savvy startedwith shorts Nadda can trace her business savvy with feature films back to the string of shorts she started making in 1996. As her films showed at international festivals, she started meeting influential people in the industry all over the world, including distributors and broadcasters.
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