Mahmoud Kaabour's Journey From Trash to 'Champ'

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Kaabour

Kaabour

IN HIS EARLY TWENTIES, Lebanese documentary filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour was hanging out on Hollywood movie sets, progressing up the ladder of his chosen profession. He’d studied at the American University in Beirut – doing well enough to earn a scholarship to Concordia University in Montreal. And now he was working on various Hollywood films that came to the Canadian city to shoot. “I made my way from production assistant – doing bathrooms and trash bags – to third assistant director, which is basically a crowd-controller,” he explains. He cites the “really awful” remake (with LL Cool J and Jean Reno starring) of the Seventies cult hit Rollerball as an example. “They had thousands of extras, so I would be assigned, say, 250 people, who I had to get cheering at the right time.”

But even though he could legitimately claim to be working in the movie industry – his goal since being a kid (“I’ve never really done anything else in my life,” he says of filmmaking) – Kaabour believed his fledgling career had already flatlined. “I came to realize that, working on set, it’s impossible to enter the creative circle, which is usually the writer, the director and the director of photography,” he says. At the time, Kaabour was teaching fitness part-time at a local gym frequented by Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand. “He gave me a lot of his time,” Kaabour explains. “And he told me, ‘Look. If you ever want to make films, you have to walk away from the set, go home, make a living doing anything, write your script, and then start marketing that as an author-director.’ And that was exactly what I did.”

While working at a record store, Kaabour began work on his first movie, Being Osama. It wasn’t long after 9/11, and Kaabour “came up with the idea of interviewing men called Osama as a way of opening a window to the sort of racism and discrimination and stereotyping that was happening.” His proposal was given the green light by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and suddenly Kaabour was the creative circle on his own project.

Last month, Kaabour’s third film, Champ of the Camp, was released in theaters in the U.A.E. – Kaabour’s country of residence for most of his life since his parents moved to Sharjah in 1989, when Kaabour was 10 years old. The movie follows several contestants in a corporate-sponsored Bollywood-based trivia and singing competition for workers in the U.A.E.’s labor camps and marks the first time that a filmmaker has been granted official long-term access into those camps. It’s an engaging look at the lives of the men whose ill-rewarded toil has built the sleek skylines of the Emirates; sympathetic without being pitying, revealing without being judgmental.

“It’s as good as I could get it,” says Kaabour, of the finished film. “This isn’t like [his second movie, the introspective documentary about his childhood and family, Teta, Alf Mara (Grandma, A Thousand Times)], where I had total control over all the elements and I could really make a piece of art. This is the kind of film I’ve been reluctant to make all my life; it derives its power from where it takes you, rather than from the finished work. I’d love to go back to films where I polish, and get it to be picture-perfect, but I was happy to put that on hold for a while to tell a story that is important. What’s more moving, a statistic saying there are 210 million migrant laborers in the world and their conditions are not great, or to see the story of one or two or three and really get it?”

Much of the success of Champ is down to the fact that Kaabour and his crew were able to identify the right people to focus the film on. And that, Kaabour says, was basically “pure luck.”

“It was a waiting game,” he explains. “But it wasn’t really hard to get anyone we spoke to to talk about interesting themes, you know? ‘How did you get here? Who are you leaving behind? What’s your personal story?’ That’s part of my general philosophy in making documentaries: Everyone’s great. Absolutely everyone. If you dig deep into the humanity of the common man, you find wonderful stuff there. But, to our good fortune, over the course of time these guys really wanted to open up.”

Champ offers an eye-opening glimpse into the world of migrant laborers. And while much of the movie focuses on how music brings them moments of joy and communion, Kaabour doesn’t shy away from the bleaker aspects of their lives – the hardships of sparse, communal living, the homesickness – either.

“We’re not locals,” says Kaabour of his family, “but we really feel we know the U.A.E. better than most people, and we’ve worked so hard here, and love to contribute to it and call it home. Champ stems from that interest. It’s not so much a criticism as much as a way of tackling the history of this region and paying tribute to the people who’ve worked really hard here. I feel it’s a story that only someone who cares about this place would make."

VIEW THE 'CHAMP OF THE CAMP' TRAILER

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