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Don’t Say Dubai To The Dubai Girl: Just Say “See You Soon”

By Jonathan Goldsbie

2007_12_16TheDubaiBrothers1.jpg
Every November and December, a handful of current and former Toronto International Film Festival employees make the trek to the United Arab Emirates to help run the Dubai International Film Festival. Its fourth year having wrapped up on Sunday, DIFF—like most everything else about Dubai—is an experiment in accelerated postmodernization, an attempt to create a world-class film festival (this year’s opening movie was Michael Clayton, with George Clooney in attendance) from scratch.
One of those imported Torontonians helping bring Dubai some of that good ol’ TIFFiciency is box office manager Dot Routledge, who has been keeping an entertaining blog of her experiences in the ballooning metropolis and posting photos to her Facebook account. One of those photos, above, caught our eye. Dot’s caption explains:

I love this ad. It’s hard to see but it shows footprints in a barren desert turning into footprints in a snowy wasteland. The ad is for Emirates Air and it’s about their new direct flights from Dubai to Toronto. I’m not sure who this is supposed to be making look good, and all I can say is “at least in a winter wasteland you can eat the snow.” Crazy.

Of course, air travel is so twentieth century. Sooner or later, the infinite wealth and ambition of the UAE will lead them to find a way to merge our cities once and for all.

Comments

  • Marc Lostracco

    I’ve been to Dubai, and it’s pretty much the strangest, most amazing, alarming, crazy, modern, insane place I’ve ever seen. I’d highly recommend it just to be amazed at the bottomless wealth and construction prowess (which is being erected basically by indentured Indian workers).
    The beautiful Dubai Marina project is actually a Torontonian concept by local firm architectsAlliance. It’s a giant, man-made marina in what was once barren desert. If you can ever catch the Frontiers of Contruction (I think?) episode on it, it’s totally worth watching.
    Zoom out on that link to see the “palm” peninsula projects offshore, and move northeast to see “The World” island development in the ocean (which interestingly and unsurprisingly eliminates Israel). See? Craziness.

  • rek

    ‘Eliminates Israel’? The World isn’t accurate as a map when it comes to continents, let alone individual countries. Why point out Israel’s apparently exclusion but not the whole of Central America and the Caribbean, Baltic Europe, and Indonesia, to start?

  • Marc Lostracco

    Because Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has been very upfront about blatantly eliminating Israel in the archipelago project. Despite looking like a map, individual islands within the jumble also represent countries—the island of “Greece,” for example, which was purchased this summer by Tommy Lee. North and South Korea are also reunified in the project.

  • chumptastic

    i enjoyed the pluto reference in the title.

  • Jonathan Goldsbie

    Thanks, chumptastic, I was afraid no one would get it.

  • matty

    as far as i can tell, the UAE isn’t a tropical paradise. It’s a dry desert, with dry desert weather. You take that 8 billion dollar island while i will spend my money in Jamaica.