Hisham Wyne is a copywriter and columnist in Dubai

Theatre, film and art productions can be a mixed grab bag where you never really know what you’re going to find. Some you walk out of feeling justifiably entertained. The start, interim and end being right where it was supposed to be. Others move you – perhaps in inexplicable ways.

#Mahmovies’ third night, chaperoned and championed by the highly personable if somewhat frazzled Mahmoud Kaabour was such a night. It was moving, powerful and utterly humanistic.

Start with the film on showcase. Sita Sings the Blues is a production by yet another author who believes in copyleft and fights against the appropriation of copyright for profit. The film, almost childishly animated, takes the audience through a technicolour riot of the legend of Ram and Sita. The banished prince leaves his kingdom, marks his provenance as a redoubtable warrior, loses his wife as hostage to a gentle villain king from Lanka, wins her back and then disowns her for impurity. She lives untouched through a burning pyre as  incandescent testament to her fidelity, but Ram plots her exile regardless to win the respect of his subjects when he finally returns home to reclaim a kingdom rightfully his.

The fourth wall is beaten into submission – this is Ram and Sita at their finest tongue in cheek. Every so often, Sita metamorphises into a busty babe singing 80′s blues to divulge the dietrius of her heart. She also changes into what could pass for illustrations to the Bhavat Geeta – the Hindu holy tome. Interspered with this is the story of a modern day Brooklyn NY couple. The man moves to India to pursue a contract, leaving his girlfriend behind. She exiles herself from New York to India to join him, but eventually gets brutally dumped with a stacatto message: “Don’t come back”. The parallels between the parables, though expertly hinted at, are never expressly etched, leaving much to the imagination. Both stories end in heartbreak, but offer eventual closure albiet incomplete.

But the night was at its zenith.

Kaabour believes in convergence, and follows his screening with a live musical performance. That night the audience, supreme in their nonchalance, reclining on bean bags and living up the ideal of creating Dubai’s largest living room, were treated to an acapella performance by singers  from the city’s massive labour camps. The performers were refugees from Dubai’s sometimes gaping wounds of excess, from  holding cells at the fringes of the city. They were a small sample of the invisible indivisble little Asians who help build this great city from the ground up, and are marginalized to the extent only Western journos on a quick fly-by in desparate quest of quick sensationalism ever mention them. They are the living manifestation of freewheeling capitalism, where rights and equity must take back seat to the relentless demands of progress, regardless of which part of the world one looks at.

Yet this night these construction automatons, these forklifts with voices, were all too normal. They looked almost posh, with their well-laundered shirts, new jeans, the occasional tie, and accoutrements such as bracelets and shades.  Kabour’s exhausted air however spoke volumes of his travails in getting permission for them to leave their camps to perform, and the numerous guarantees required to ensure they would not try to abscond.

They sang their hearts out. Nervous at first and passionate at second, they offered a potent reminder of the talent innate in any individual, be he one who spends his days hefting bricks and living the life of a metaphorical pebble. They evolved, they became;  they skilfully belted out Bollywood melodies, songs and ghazals without the crutch of music or even the guidance of a lyric sheet.

We all joined in, with racuous applause and hoots from those who didn’t understand the lyrics, and attempts at croaking along from those who did.

At their best, with their stage fright,  impromptu bravado and less than professional timing, they were no more than human. But importantly, they were never  less than human. Never did they sink to what they will at 3 a.m this morning as I type this, when they once again will become mindless nameless drones painstakingly hewing a city out of sand. Unnoticed save occasionally, as Kaabour said, when they cross a highway two inches  from your car’s bumper.

Tonight, we were all uniquely human. Nor more niether less. And for that, a heartful thanks must go out to Mahmoud Kaabour, #Mahmovies and the Jam Jar crowd. And also to them, those faceless economic opportunists who will spend their lives building in this haze. They’ll be trundling on an annonymous bus to yet another building site by the time I finish editing this.

And we’ll go home smug in the knowledge that we’ve had a brush with Dubai’s underbelly. “Culture, dahlliiink,” as one female within earshot drawled contentedly to her bored male companion.