Image Nation’s Michael Garin

Image Nation Abu Dhabi is on a mission to turn the emirate into a thriving content hub in the Middle East. The organization has been investing in both local and Hollywood movies and theatrical documentaries and has kicked its television activities into high gear with the Arabic-language drama Justice and Quest Arabiya, a joint-venture channel with Discovery Communications. The CEO of Image Nation is Michael Garin, who is using his years of experience working in Hollywood and the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe to cultivate a strong and successful production business in Abu Dhabi. He tells TV MEA about his strategy.

TV MEA: Image Nation is well known for its feature-film output. Why was it important to begin developing the TV side?
GARIN: We’ve been developing the TV business very aggressively. Our mission is to build the foundations of a film and television business in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). What became clear to Mohamed Al Mubarak [the chairman of Image Nation] and me early on is that when you make movies, it’s like throwing a rock into a pond. It makes a very big splash, the ripples spread out and then five minutes later the pond is calm again. With television, if it’s a channel [the ripples continue] 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, and if it’s a series it could [make an impact for] six months or more. If we’re going to build a sustainable industry, television has to be at the center of everything we do. We’re not diminishing the importance of movies, but they alone are not going to build a sustainable industry in our region.

TV MEA: How did you begin building the television slate?
GARIN: We began the way most things start at Image Nation: the [Abu Dhabi] leadership identifies an issue but doesn’t know how to address it in entertainment terms. Our first production, Beyond Borders, began with a conversation between Mohamed Mubarak Al Mazrouei [Undersecretary of the Crown Prince Court, the governing body of Abu Dhabi] and our chairman, Mohamed Al Mubarak. This is a region of great wealth and the leadership lead by example. They have a very careful eye on the youth. We came up with the idea of taking a group of young Emiratis, between the ages of 16 and 18, to the Philippines—where their maids come from, where many of their luxury goods are made—and introducing them to real life. We produced a six-hour documentary that ran on MBC. It subsequently ran on Abu Dhabi Television as a half-hour series. It resonated everywhere—with the audience, with the leadership—and it was a life-changing experience for the kids. It gave us confidence that we could do two things at the same time: entertain and inform.

The next one we did was UAE Youth Ambassadors, documenting an impressive undertaking that demonstrates the long-term vision of the UAE. [The government] takes the best university graduates to countries that have been identified as being important to the long-term future of the UAE. They learn the language, the culture, and can start building their personal networks. The first year we followed them to China and Korea. In a program airing this fall, we followed a different group to China, Korea and Germany.

TV MEA: You’ve also expanded into scripted. How did Qalab Al Adalah (Justice) come about?
GARIN: It began with a discussion with Sheikh Mansour [chairman of the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department]. The Judicial Department is proud of the quality of justice that is available to everyone, whether they’re citizens, residents or visitors. The question was raised as to how we could showcase this. So we proposed [a legal drama] as a solution. And that sparked a lot of interest. We got a grant to develop the show, and we followed Image Nation and UAE traditions in marrying the best of international expertise with local talent and knowledge. We went to [American producer] Walter Parkes, and he came up with the concept of a series that followed the plight of a young Emirati woman who grew up in the UAE, went to the United States for university and a law education, and then returned to the UAE and became a lawyer. Walter, with his extensive experience and connections, reached out to Billy Finkelstein, an Emmy-winning writer and executive producer of shows like L.A. Law and NYPD Blue. He developed the series into 20 one-hour episodes and came up with a brilliant story arc that I call L.A. Law meets Dallas in Abu Dhabi. It’s a courtroom drama. It’s a family drama. It all takes place in Arabic in Abu Dhabi.

We brought it to the Judicial Department, who also loved the idea, and they agreed to work with us to guarantee its authenticity. The cases that they proposed to us were so much more cutting edge than we would have dared to include. Most people think that the government wants to shape the message and control things and doesn’t want to show the underside of society, which, if you’re doing a court show, you can’t avoid. We got cases from them that we would have been somewhat reticent to propose: drugs, spousal abuse, homicide, it was a full range of things you’d expect to come across in a courtroom.

TV MEA: Will you be taking it out to the global market?
GARIN: Everything we do, we try to make it for a global audience. We do that for several reasons. Firstly, our television market is a Gulf market, and it loses money. So the only hope of creating a sustainable industry is to make programs that travel around the world. And secondly, people have so many misconceptions about our part of the world that we hope that when they see the programs we make, it not only will entertain but also inform them about what family life is like, what the system of justice is here. When you think about the programs that come to MIPCOM, nobody cares what language they are shot in. What matters is the quality of the production, the story and the acting. We think we’ve nailed it with this series.

TV MEA: Tell us about Quest Arabiya, your venture with Discovery Communications.
GARIN: It gives us a whole different resource. We’re completely dependent on general-entertainment networks to run our [scripted] programs. With Quest, we both commission and broadcast the programs. It is the other reason our output is expanding exponentially. The general-entertainment networks recognize us as one of the leading sources of entertainment programming. With Quest, we’re recognized as one of the main sources of factual entertainment as well, as opposed to just pure documentaries, which we’re also doing.

Our goal for Quest Arabiya is to [eventually produce up to] 40 percent of the content of the channel, and the rest will come from Discovery. Our main reason for being at MIPCOM is to meet international producers to partner with us on content for Quest.

TV MEA: What are you doing in the doc space?
GARIN: Probably the most important documentaries that we’ve done to date are He Named Me Malala and Every Last Child. He Named Me Malala was directed by Academy Award winner Davis Guggenheim and produced by Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald under their long-term production partnership with Image Nation Abu Dhabi. It was made in association with Participant and National Geographic Channel and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures worldwide. Every Last Child, directed by award-winning filmmaker Tom Roberts, was about the ongoing polio crisis. Bill Gates, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, committed $4.5 billion to eradicate polio. With the World Health Organization, they asked us to help manage the communications effort to support this initiative. There were two components: in Pakistan [one of three countries where polio remains endemic], and then around the world with an international documentary. We made a 3.5-minute video, A Leap of Faith, in Urdu, which encouraged [Pakistani migrants in the UAE] to make sure their children were vaccinated. We needed to be as creative in our distribution strategy as we were in the content creation, so we ran this [in theaters] before Bollywood movies, we brought it to the labor villages and held screenings, it aired on [Etihad] flights to Pakistan. And it had a very real impact.

TV MEA: In your current role, do you see any parallels between Abu Dhabi now and the state of the Central and Eastern European media businesses when you were at CME?
GARIN: I do. It is sort of how I ended up coming to Abu Dhabi. When I arrived at CME, all of our stations were run by local people, but 100 percent of our corporate staff in London were from Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand. When I left CME, my successor was from Central and Eastern Europe and more than 50 percent of the corporate staff was from the region. What Abu Dhabi aspires to is local control of their destiny. When Mohamed Al Mubarak and I arrived, 3 percent of the staff, one person, was Emirati, and now over 60 percent of our permanent staff are Emirati. Every job other than mine where there’s an expat number one, there’s an Emirati number two who in three to five years will be ready to assume that responsibility.

TV MEA: What have been some of your biggest challenges in developing the local sector?
GARIN: Interestingly, the biggest challenge is with the audience. This is an incredibly sophisticated audience. They see the same Hollywood movies, the same Netflix series, the same everything that Western audiences see, day and date. They have very low expectations for local production. Our biggest challenge is to get local audiences to understand that if they go see an Emirati film or watch an Emirati television program, it might be a different entertainment experience, but it will be every bit as satisfying as the ones that they’re used to seeing. That’s why our sale of [the feature film] Zinzana (Rattle the Cage) to Netflix was so critical. People may not have seen it in the movie theaters, but when they see it on Netflix, they’ll say wow, the next time Majid Al Ansari makes a movie, maybe I’ll go see it in the theater.

The vast majority of money spent in our region for programming is spent in one month, during Ramadan. Justice is designed to run outside of Ramadan. Producing a series before it’s sold is unheard of in television terms, but nobody would buy this series until they saw it. This is part of what we had to do in terms of building an industry and investing in the future. We hope broadcasters will find that they can attract audiences and revenues in the other 11 months of the year. And Image Nation will supply its fair share of that content. But I always say, We’re not trying to build Image Nation, we’re trying to build the nation. Everything we do is with and through private-sector companies. We’re not trying to build a monolithic company. If I were in Hollywood or at CME, I’d try to be as big as we could be. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to build an industry. I’m working for a country. My job is to make everybody succeed.

TV MEA: How does Image Nation work with twofour54?
GARIN: We are sister organizations. Noura Al Kaabi, who is the chairwoman of the Media Zone Authority and twofour54, is on our board. twofour54’s mission is to make sure that there is an infrastructure in place that allows us to have a sustainable industry. Image Nation’s role is to make sure that there are local creative capabilities to utilize that infrastructure so that we’re not solely dependent on outside production companies using us strictly as a location. The talent that exists in Abu Dhabi is extraordinary, and it’s the rich dividend that 50 years of investment in education and empowerment of women is paying. This is a changing society and the modern and the traditional are coming to terms with each other. It’s one of the key themes of Justice. That’s one of the reasons we think it will be such a powerful series.