Despite the fact that the age of the Emirati cinema is still young, it has created a young generation full of talent and creativity with their own unique point of view about making films. From this generation, the name of Nawaf Al-Janahi shines as a filmmaker and photographer who has an astonishing and distinguished experience in filmmaking with concentration on the language of vision by utilizing all the expressive capabilities that the image may contain. The films he has made to date present him as a special case in the UAE Cinema, characterized by independent direction, disengaging himself from ordinary, direct, and traditional approach with which is nowadays found in the mainstream Arabic cinema. And if we took into consideration that cinema is a picture that talks and tells independently, then the films directed by Nawaf Al-Janahi are closer to the pure cinematographic state.

Nawaf Al-Janahi started his profession in directing with Obsession in 2002, followed by On a Road where his special and unique talent sparkled as he intelligently cancelled the dialogue and made the image the first and last hero. The film portrays a man who keeps running up to the end! Through this simple approach he succeeds in stimulating deep philosophic implications. In the same manner, he made his third film Souls in 2004, where he showed a group of individuals facing the camera, then facing their death, each one separately. An interested person can watch these three films via the director’s website on the internet (www.njan7.com)

Mirrors of Silence is the most recent work of Nawaf Al-Janahi. He participated with it in the last edition of Dubai International Film Festival, in the short film competition, and will participate with it in the section of Arabic Panorama in the next Emirates Film Competition.

In a visual and symbolic language, and without any dialogue, the film shows the story of the civilization and huge constructional developments that overwhelmed the UAE in the last years. It shows how this development came on the account of the human being who was crushed under huge amounts of tile and cement. The human being suffers from loss and desertion and has no refuge except by returning back to his inner side, to his dreams. It is the only consolation even if he does not guarantee achieving them. Don’t we love life? Then let us go back towards ourselves since it is the only and last shining place in life when the external world is nothing but a big prison composed of streets and buildings!

This interpretation may correspond to what the director wants, or it may not! And here, we are talking exactly about the most important characteristic in the cinema of Nawaf Al-Janahi, it is subject to all possible interpretations since each one of us have their own correct interpretation! And this makes it inciting cinema that leads to thinking and obliges the viewer to participate in the construction of the images and in the arrangement of its implications till he get to the final meaning. And if we put aside the meaning and idea that Mirrors of Silence presents, and focused on the aspects of visual aesthetics, then we see another important characteristic that is constant in the cinema of Nawaf Al-Janahi; it is the beauty of the picture. From the beginning of the film we see a stream of pictures running consecutively and smoothly in a logical coordination that creates a specific idea and develops it till the climax on the theater’s stage. Each one of these scenes has its own special beauty, and the intended magnificent manipulation and the play in color and light had increased its brightness, to result finally into a “beautiful” and attractive film with a structure that comes equally parallel with the clearance and provocation of the idea. This concern with the aesthetic aspects arises probably from the fact that Nawaf Al-Janahi is a photographer who tastes the picture and feels its beauty.