It is quite a challenge to make a movie about people from other countries and cultures. It certainly was one for Spanish filmmaker Agust\u00ed Villaronga, the 67-year-old director of the film “Born a King”. During a talk at Cinema Akil in Dubai last Saturday, Villaronga spoke about his 2017 film which tells the story of Saudi King Faisal who was just 14 years’ old when he was sent to London by his father, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, then the emir of Nejd and the future founder of Saudi Arabia. It was in 1919 and Saudi Arabia did not exist at the time as the kingdom was officially established in 1932. This is what filmmaking does, it teaches you new things, and it helps you find yourself too, as Villaronga explained. \u201cWhen you\u2019re making a film, it\u2019s very important to go back to the roots of your soul.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As part of the Spanish Film week at Dubai\u2019s Cinema Akil, and in collaboration with the Spanish Embassy in the U.A.E., Villaronga talked about some of the other movies that he made, especially \u201cBlack Bread\u201d which was screened after the talk. \u201cBlack Bread\u201d (2010) was based on a novel of the same name, \u201cPa negre,\u201d by Catalan writer Emili Teixidor. It is set in the post-civil war years in Catalonia, a region of Spain. The cultural proximity made directing the film an easy job, said Villaronga. He was able to \u201cunderstand the psychology of women,\u201d coming from his experience of living with many women, including his mother and sisters. His background helped him identify with the child actor in \u201cBlack Bread\u201d who ends up living in a house full of women, searching for the murderer that caused his innocent father\u2019s imprisonment. That film was the first Catalan-language movie to be nominated for best foreign film in the Oscars. In 2011, the movie won the Goya Award for Best Directo<\/a>r. The Goya Awards are Spain’s top annual film awards and are considered the Spanish equivalent of the American Academy Awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is quite a challenge to make a movie about people from other countries and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":5191,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5193,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190\/revisions\/5193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
When Villaronga was asked whether he\u2019ll make another film about the Middle East, he said he was not so sure. He was obviously reluctant to face another challenging adventure because movies about the Middle East often tackle some very complicated political issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"