You see them everywhere you go in Doha, especially in the West Bay area where the festival hotels are located: yellow American school buses. At dusk (which falls in the late afternoon here), the buses line up outside the building sites, waiting for the migrant labourers — the vast majority of them from south Asia — who work on the behemoths that will soon be hotels and office blocks. In the shopping malls (which are the main gathering places in Doha, as there’s not much public space), long lines of migrants queue to send remittances home to their families.
Expats are integral to the Qatari economy. Although the available figures aren’t precise, it’s thought they outnumber citizens of the emirate by nearly three to one. The W Doha hotel, where I’m staying, is a case in point. Safak Guvenc, the hotel’s manager, who is himself Turkish, told me that he employs people of 62 different nationalities, many of whom live together in a company “village” a 20-minute bus ride away. The majority were recruited by Guvenc and his colleagues in what the company’s benignly Orwellian argot calls “talent shows” held in the workers’ home countries — Malaysia and the Philippines, in particular.
I was keen to talk to Guvenc about the “village”, but unpicking the hard sell about how the W “brand” fuses the “local” and “global” was difficult, and, in any case, he really wanted to talk about Martin Scorsese, who’d shown up at the hotel for drinks last night. Along with most of the festival “talent”, Scorsese is staying at the Four Seasons just along the bay. Having wandered along to have a look at the Four Seasons this afternoon, I can understand why he might have been eager to escape: the principal architectural influence on it appears, from the outside at least, to have been Ceaucescu-era Bucharest. The W building, meanwhile, does watered-down Las Vegas like nearly everyone else.
Scorsese doesn’t have a film in the festival. Among the leading American directors who do is Steven Soderbergh, whose film The Informant, which opens in the UK next week, I went to see earlier this evening. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a corporate whistleblower at ADM, a pillar of Midwestern agribusiness. The film looks as though it’s going to be a standard-issue corporate conspiracy drama (I thought I detected a nod or two in the direction of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece of Seventies paranoia The Conversation in the title sequence). But then it rather elegantly transforms itself into a psychological comedy, in which the extravagant subterfuges Whitacre perpetrates both on himself (Damon plays him as a genius of self-delusion) and others (including the FBI) turn out to be much more important than the price-fixing scandal that put him in the orbit of the Feds in the first place.
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