What the sea brings: cinema at the shoreline in Bahrain's first feature production and film culture

Abstract

This essay explores cinema in the small island nation, the Kingdom of Bahrain, focusing especially on the first feature film, The Barrier (1990), and the country's developing film culture. The beginning of film-making and film exhibition in Bahrain is inextricably linked to the rise of the oil industry and the concurrent decline of the pearl industry – two institutional discourses that shape (often contradictory) cultural mythologies associated with modernity and tradition. The shoreline and sea imagery, and narrative and representational strategies of The Barrier present a cautionary message regarding insular existence, lack of a larger communal identity and absence of a sense of social and political responsibility. I connect my reading of The Barrier with the larger Bahraini film cultural landscape, constructions of ‘Gulf’ cinema and contemporary transmedia assertions of Bahraini identity.