When Majid Al Ansari was a young boy in school, he saw one of his classmates crying. “He came to me and goes, ‘I think my father hates me.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, your father hates you?’ ‘He married someone else. He doesn’t love me anymore.’”
This was the first time that the idea of polygamy really touched his life. His friend’s father had taken a second wife, as is legal in his home country of the United Arab Emirates, and the rest of the family had been left to deal with the emotional impact.
That memory has stuck with Al Ansari, and is a core influence on his second film, The Vile. Like his debut, slick crime thriller Zinzana, it will receive its world premiere this week in Austin at Fantastic Fest, but it’s a completely different kind of film. Zinzana was a film about macho muscular posturing, but if that sealed-bottle treat was his Reservoir Dogs, The Vile is his Jackie Brown, centered around the experiences of middle-aged women in his home country – but all done with a surprising narrative twist.
In The Vile, stage actress Bdoor Mohammad makes her international screen debut as Amani, a wife and mother whose existence is thrown into chaos when her husband, Khalid (Jasem Alkharraz), suddenly turns up at the family home with Zahra (Sarah Taibah), who is younger and prettier than Amani, and already pregnant with the son that Khalid always wanted.
Having grown up in a nation where polygamy is legal but rarely discussed, Al Ansari knew this was a story that deserved to be told. However, he wasn’t initially sure how to tackle it while remaining a genre director without seeming disrespectful. It wasn’t until 2020 that a conversation with his mother provided him with what he called his “a-hah! moment” as he realized that what he wanted to make was both a sociological study and an occult thriller. He recalled, “We’re having a conversation about polygamy, and she says, ‘I don’t blame the husband, and I don’t blame the first wife. I think it’s the second wife who does black magic.’”
Austin Chronicle: When we talked in 2015, you discussed the shape of the Emirati film industry at the time, and how it was dominated by the American and Egyptian industries. How has it changed in the last decade?
Majid Al Ansari: It’s better. It’s tough for UAE because our market isn’t big enough. That’s what we realized after Zinzana and The Worthy and we had a few other films came out, that unless you make your film for $400,000, $500,000, it’s so hard to make money. The Emirati films, only Emirati will come watch it and it’s rare that anyone else will, so you’re pigeonholed into the Emirati audience. You’re talking about 1.2 million people, and maybe 300,000 saw it, so you really have to make your films for $500,000 to make money or break even. But the problem is that UAE is expensive and it’s not cheap to make movies here.
But what’s happened is that the Saudi market has opened up. You have companies like Telfaz11 who are doing incredible incredible work, as well as films like Sattar and now Alzarfa, which are doing 900,000 admissions. They’re getting to the million mark, which is a big step compared to the UAE where your biggest local film would be 350,000 or 390,000 admissions. So there is a bright future with a moment of integration where we start making films that we’ll export to Saudi, or Saudi comes to shoot here, or we go to Saudi and shoot there. There’s a lot more collaboration between us and Saudi, as well as the other GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries.
So we are busy. Thank God, as a director I’m still busy. What we need to start looking at is, hey, let’s make films from the heart, and let’s see if we can grow this audience. For a long time the emphasis was on growing the crew and the infrastructure. But I feel we need to start looking at the audience first, and growing that, and the infrastructure will follow.
AC: You’ve been busy with TV for the past few years, so what was the process that led to The Vile being your second feature?
MAA: Before I became to Fantastic Fest [in 2015], there was one film that changed my perspective, and that was before I even debuted Zinzana, and that was The Wailing by Na Hong-jin. I was looking at it and crying and going, ‘That’s where I should have taken it.’
That’s when I realized that, if I was going to make a movie, I should make it personal. I wanted to make a movie where the horror comes from us. Zinzana, I had a blast doing it, but I had a certain directions where I wanted to take it. With this one, I don’t want anyone to be able to remake it anywhere. I want it to be so culturally in tune and hardcore that it talks about us and only us, but then have that be universal and have it spread and open a window to our culture that Zinzana didn’t particularly do. Zinzana was a genre film for the love of the genre, the love of filmmaking. This one is a story that comes from within, and it’s a more personal story.
AC: Zinzana is a masculine movie, two guys with big egos meeting their match. Here, you’re putting yourself in the position of putting the women’s voices first, and I was wondering about, for you, making something that the women in your life will look at and say, ‘This is our experience.’
“The last thing I wanted as a filmmaker was my mom watching it [and] saying, ‘You’re an idiot.’”
The second thing I did was that I was so lucky – and it was luck – was casting Bdoor. We’d pushed the shooting schedule three months just because we were having a hard time finding the right Amani, and then I went to a theatre festival in Sharja and the first show I saw Bdoor pops up. Her energy was crazy. I saw it, and I was like, ‘An Emirati woman with this much energy, it will seep in. You can feel it in the room.’ I knew it was her.
So I sent her the script, and we sat down for coffee. She looks at me and says, ‘You know, it took me five times to get through your script.’ Now I’m shitting my pants. ‘Oh, so you hate it. It’s shit.’ And she goes, ‘No, no, no. It’s too close to home. Reading it, I loved and I related it, but I was too scared to do it.’ So I knew that casting her would be the best decision I could do, because that would change the trajectory of the realness of this movie. Having Bdoor there by my side, who had experiences something similar to this, and who had family members experience something similar to this, she gave me things you can’t write on the page.
The third thing we did, my number one rule was I needed a female editor. I’m not going to have a male editor. I needed Fatma and I needed a female editor, and I literally moved myself to Tunisia for three months and worked with (Hafedh Laridhi), who is an incredible, incredible film editor based in Tunisia. She had kids and couldn’t travel, so I left my kids and left my family, just to ensure that the voices of the females, and especially the voice of Amani, was there.
There’s multiple layers to it, because there’s looking at it from the female perspective, and then there’s the perspective of the female who has been through it, and the ultimate betrayal. This is when I brought back in Bdoor, to have a look at it, and we’d have these conversations. So this was my process of making sure my mom doesn’t cuss me out afterwards.
AC: So have you dared show your mum yet?
MAA: Not yet! That, I’m nervous, nervous about. When I was editing I showed her the first 20 minutes, because that’s the setup and I wanted to make sure that’s right. And throughout the year I showed her, ‘Hey, what d’you think of this conversation that they’re having?’ and she said, ‘Hey, that sounds like me and your aunt!’
The Vile
World Premiere
Saturday Sept 20, 8:40pm
Wednesday, Sept. 24, 4:50pm
Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
Find all our news, reviews, and interviews at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.