Fatma Al-Ghanim is a Qatari athlete and filmmaker who is breaking new ground for women in the tiny country and in the Arab world at large. In 2010, she captained Qatar’s first-ever women’s national soccer team. Now, Al-Ghanim is at the Tribeca Film Festival with “Theatre of Dreams,” a powerful short that marks her directorial and acting debut and exposes the fierce cultural opposition to women playing soccer in Qatar from her personal prism.
Set against the backdrop of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and inspired by her real-life story, “Theatre of Dreams” delves into why the country’s female national soccer team — which was created in 2009 as Qatar was preparing to bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup — has been inactive since 2014 and is currently unranked in the FIFA world ranking.
Segueing from her soccer career, Al-Ghanim became one of the first Qatari women to compete in a triathlon, later serving as the first female board member of the Qatar Triathlon Federation. She also started working for the Doha Film Institute, which led to her directorial debut.
Below, Al-Ghanim speaks to Variety about the drive to make “Theatre of Dreams” after suppressing the trauma caused by her experience spearheading female soccer in Qatar. As she puts it: “Something was stirring in me, and if it didn’t come out, my body was going to turn on me.”
This film is clearly very personal. What prompted you to want to tell this story?
I worked at the Doha Film Institute and was trying to get into filmmaking in some way. The biggest catalyst came during the 2022 World Cup. A lot of international journalists, who had heard that there used to be a women’s football team and were looking for athletes to interview to talk about the women’s side of the game, reached out to me. I’ve had incredible achievements in triathlon and have been supported to reach the world stage in that sport. But the difficulty that we face as Qatari women in sports and Arab women in sports, it’s so nuanced. It has nothing to do with the fact that the institutions or the country don’t support women’s sports. The challenges are really more nuclear, in the family and society. So when the World Cup came up, I couldn’t avoid dealing with this trauma anymore.
Tell me more.
The entire city was dressed with billboards of [male] players that looked larger than life. I had to drive through them every day, and it started to stir something in me. I was feeling guilty for not doing more for the sport. The Qatar Football Association had asked me to start taking on a greater role in women’s football [soccer]. But I started to feel that doing that as a manager wasn’t going to help the real issue. The real change had to be a mindset change, one that would break that taboo of fear that families have. What does it mean for for women to play a sport that’s mostly associated with male domination? All of that started to make me feel like something was stirring in me, and if it didn’t come out, my body was going to turn on me.
There’s a powerful moment in your film when you see the Qatar women’s soccer team playing on TV and you hear male voices making comments in Arabic translated in the subtitles as: “Congrats… we now have dykes and trannies on TV!” Was this line drawn from reality?
Yes, those lines were taken word-for-word from discussion forums. These forums also had a lot of supportive comments. So people were fighting [about the issue] back and forth. But when you reach that level of negativity, you know you are breaking a cultural taboo and that you are being the first to do so. So this is really a story about what it takes to be the first, and the cost that comes with breaking a barrier. You know, sometimes even if it’s a win, it doesn’t look like a win at the time. But someone has to be the first to break through that barrier, and it doesn’t always end up in a huge triumph and a trophy and a comeback story. For the longest time, I had an issue telling my own story, because I never felt like it really ended with a win. Then I realized, well, actually it does. Because I’m still here and I’m still talking about it. And the act of putting myself in front of the camera, and choosing visibility rather than being intimidated, and owning that vulnerability. That is something that now I’m completely owning.
“Theatre of Dreams.”
Courtesy Doha Film Institute
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
